Container image storage in Azure Container Registry

Every Basic, Standard, and Premium Azure container registry benefits from advanced Azure storage features including encryption-at-rest. The following sections describe the features and limits of image storage in Azure Container Registry (ACR).

Encryption-at-rest

All container images and other artifacts in your registry are encrypted at rest. Azure automatically encrypts an image before storing it, and decrypts it on-the-fly when you or your applications and services pull the image. Optionally apply an extra encryption layer with a customer-managed key.

Regional storage

Azure Container Registry stores data in the region where the registry is created, to help customers meet data residency and compliance requirements. In all regions except Brazil South and Southeast Asia, Azure may also store registry data in a paired region in the same geography. In the Brazil South and Southeast Asia regions, registry data is always confined to the region, to accommodate data residency requirements for those regions.

If a regional outage occurs, the registry data may become unavailable and is not automatically recovered. Customers who wish to have their registry data stored in multiple regions for better performance across different geographies or who wish to have resiliency in the event of a regional outage should enable geo-replication.

Geo-replication

For scenarios requiring high-availability assurance, consider using the geo-replication feature of Premium registries. Geo-replication helps guard against losing access to your registry in the event of a regional failure. Geo-replication provides other benefits, too, like network-close image storage for faster pushes and pulls in distributed development or deployment scenarios.

Zone redundancy

To help create a resilient and high-availability Azure container registry, optionally enable zone redundancy in select Azure regions. A feature of the Premium service tier, zone redundancy uses Azure availability zones to replicate your registry to a minimum of three separate zones in each enabled region. Combine geo-replication and zone redundancy to enhance both the reliability and performance of a registry.

Scalable storage

Azure Container Registry allows you to create as many repositories, images, layers, or tags as you need, up to the registry storage limit.

High numbers of repositories and tags can affect the performance of your registry. Periodically delete unused repositories, tags, and images as part of your registry maintenance routine, and optionally set a retention policy for untagged manifests. Deleted registry resources such as repositories, images, and tags cannot be recovered after deletion. For more information about deleting registry resources, see Delete container images in Azure Container Registry.

Storage cost

For full details about pricing, see Azure Container Registry pricing.

Next steps

For more information about Basic, Standard, and Premium container registries, see Azure Container Registry service tiers.