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Comment by Tomdarkness | Hacker News Reader

Seems extremely expensive, especially the data transfer part. Just a quick calculation at $0.50/GB we would end up spending $10,000s in just data transfer costs vs $0 with AWS ECR (transfer within region is free).

Guess this would work out okay for storing some development images but definitely does not seem feasible for production use.

Unless I'm missing something? There's some fine print about it being free within the context of a github action, but this doesn't really seem clear. Does my fleet of ec2 instances pulling down the image after a new deployment count as within an "action"?

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Data transfer between GHCR and Actions is free. We're building out a much tighter integration between your source code and the artifacts created. The effects of this will create a stronger supply chain link and work toward better reproducibility.

We recommend using GHCR for the development and test workflows and then publishing to the "Cloud *CRs" for your production images such that they can be pulled directly from there.

Why do you recommend?

Because that's how you get paid or is there actually a value add here I'm not seeing?

"Tighter integration" and stronger vendor lockin isn't actually a selling point for anyone but the seller.

I'm not sure I buy the "better reproducibility" line either, whats better here?

Well, if nothing else, it means you'll have extremely quick connectivity between your GitHub Action Runner and the registry :)

As mentioned, this is best (for now) as a dev/test tool, rather than a general container registry.

Disclosure: I work at Azure.

Ok, and that justifies the cost somehow?

Disclosure: that was obvious :)

No hard feelings, just pointing out the community needs more than corp speak to be convinced, especially when Microsoft is telling you "its just better ok"

I think you’re wrong about tighter integration not being a selling point. Integration makes things more accessible to a wider audience and can increase productivity when done well too because it will make moving data through a system broadly more reliable.

Thats fair, if you want tight integration with azure and GitHub, I can see how that would be a good thing.

The problem is, tighter coupling still comes with costs that some people aren't willing to pay.

Yep. Agreed on all points.

Probably because it gets rid you of a basic CI: GH Actions will build an image and materialize it for you on GH CR. Guess that's the main advantage.

Really looking forward to trying this! When I tried using Actions to build a Docker image and deploy it to Kubernetes two months ago the entire experience felt rather clunky, especially when working with a cloud provider that's not one of the big three.

I don't see drastic pulling time reduction by migrating from DockerHub.

I have 2GB container image, originally pulling takes 31-44sec. After migrating to ghcr.io, it was 38sec. Image is set public and running on a private(org) repository Action.

How much faster should we expect?

Is it also free if a self-hosted GH Actions runner pulls from the GH container registry?

I'm guessing they mean it's free for Github Actions that run in a Docker container: https://docs.github.com/en/actions/creating-actions/creating...

Probably just GitHub Actions in general, although I'm not sure if it differentiates between self-hosted runners and hosted runners (which presumably run in the same Azure datacenter where transfer is free/less than $0.01/gb).

Where do you see that? I can't find data transfer pricing anywhere.

Edit: Found it. https://github.com/features/packages#pricing

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