Red Hat Quay 3.1: Now even better across distributed environments

This capability makes use of the container tool Skopeo. Skopeo is a popular member of the OpenShift family, sharing underlying libraries with CRI-O, Podman and Buildah. Since Skopeo communicates directly with registry servers (no daemon required), it’s well suited for replication. 

Operators to help deploy and manage the container registry

Operators, which encode the operational knowledge of the lifecycle and management of a Kubernetes-native application, have been on the rise in the Kubernetes ecosystem. Operators play an important role not only for the Kubernetes ecosystem, but also for Red Hat Quay in particular. Three major features of Red Hat Quay 3.1 are based on the Operator technology and other Operators are planned for future versions of Quay.

With this release of Quay, we introduce an Operator for Quay called the Quay Setup Operator that helps to deploy and maintain Quay on Red Hat OpenShift. A full Quay deployment (including a database) can be performed in minutes thanks to automation, which helps to more efficiently configure development and test environments. OpenShift customers can focus on their applications versus having to manage Quay. Initially marked as Developer Preview we plan to capture customer feedback and stabilize it before making it available as Generally Available in future releases of Quay. Customers are welcome to use it, provide feedback or even contribute to the code using the GitHub repository.

Storage backend leveraging NooBaa 

Red Hat Quay already supports a variety of storage backends for both on-premise and cloud deployments. With Quay 3.1 we proudly introduce support for NooBaa, leveraging the NooBaa S3 Operator. NooBaa is a flexible, lightweight and scalable S3 API which supports various storage services underneath. NooBaa's Operator plans to be available as the Red Hat Multi-Cloud Object Gateway Operator, as part of Red Hat OpenShift Container Storage 3, with more features planned to be leveraged in future versions of Quay. This helps to set the stage to allow customers to use Red Hat OpenShift Container Storage in current and future versions with Quay.

A new entry in the dropdown menu for storage backends inside the configuration UI has been added for customers to try out in Technology Preview. 

Support for partner offering to run PostgreSQL in HA mode on OpenShift using an Operator

While Quay could be deployed in a highly available manner running on OpenShift we recommended to run the database outside of the cluster in previous versions of Red Hat Quay. This is due to a lack of operational capabilities of stateful database applications if they run on Kubernetes. Now with Operator technology, it has helped to solve these types of operational problems. Today, Red Hat’s partner ecosystem offers various database Operators in Operatorhub.io. 

Our focus is on the core registry and therefore we can leverage our partner ecosystem for areas of additional expertise. Starting with Red Hat Quay v3.1 customers can use the Crunchy Data PostgreSQL Operator, which has been tested to provision database backends of Quay.

"Crunchy Data greatly values its collaboration with Red Hat, and has been a first mover in contributing to open source technologies like the PostgreSQL Operator, which uses the Operator Framework. Crunchy Data helps the Red Hat Quay container registry to offer a resilient high-availability architecture for the PostgreSQL storage back end. Our mutual customers can scale their Quay environments with the confidence of an infrastructure agnostic, cloud-native database-as-a-service, and the backing of support from our skilled PostgreSQL engineers," said David Bagley, VP of Worldwide Sales, Crunchy Data.

Support for (temporarily) frozen or archived repositories

Certain customers are in the process of defining their operational models and processes for containerized applications. Meanwhile they also need to be aligned to several regulations or internal processes requiring additional governance as part of their application lifecycle management. They may need to keep all versions of their containerized applications that have been used in production for a certain amount, even after they’ve been decommissioned, or they may need to temporarily “freeze” a repository to prevent undesirable content changes. 

To help satisfy those customer requirements Quay 3.1 introduces a read-only repository mode, otherwise known as frozen zones. This is designed to give developers more granular control over their environments at critical times, such as freezing certain zones from any changes right before a production release. 

What’s ahead for Quay

Red Hat is committed to the continued development of Quay. We have a number of updates planned. In the future, we will continue to focus on a deeper integration into OpenShift as the industry’s most comprehensive enterprise Kubernetes platform using Operator based services, advanced vulnerability scanning and enhanced support for distributed, multi-cloud setups and air-gapped environments. For further information you can watch the most recent roadmap briefing.

Quay 3.1 is now available. Get started with Quay.