Consider hosting docker images on docker hub

[rbertoncelj (Rok Bertoncelj)]

Please consider hosting your docker images in docker hub, like "normal" companies. E.g. "elastic/elasticsearch" or "elasticco/elasticsearch". It's a well established practice and people are used to finding official images there, know how to use it, integrate it easily into CI/CD pipelines, etc... Hosting images in your own repository is an unnecessary complication for your users.

Is there a specific reason on your part for not doing so?

[xeraa]

Thanks for the feedback. We are aware that this is slightly unusual, but there are two reasons for it:

1. DockerHub is not as stable and performant as we need it to be; since we provide hosted services with an SLA we need a rock solid registry to stand up new clusters. We can only guarantee this is if we host it ourselves — but you are benefiting from this as well.
2. We have very detailed download statistics, so we know which products and versions are in high demands, which regions are the most active or getting more active,... DockerHub does not provide any insights, but it is important for our product team.

However, once you are aware of our registry, I don't think it should be a problem. Instead of elasticsearch:5.4.0 you need to use docker.elastic.co/elasticsearch/elasticsearch:5.4.0, but that should not be a dealbreaker.

[rbertoncelj (Rok Bertoncelj)]

Thank you for your answer. Sounds reasonable.

You could however also push images to docker hub in addition to your own repository (the later being used for provisioning of your hosted services). Unfortunately you could not get detailed statistics this way.

[xeraa]

We thought about providing a dummy image which just links back to our registry. Let's see how the deprecation and switch from DockerHub works out...

[dadoonet (David Pilato)]

I think that it would be better if dockerhub could reference external links.

I asked some folks at Docker but the answer was not super positive.