Kraken – P2P Docker Registry | Hacker News Reader

Kraken – P2P Docker Registry

github.com

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Not to be confused with GitKraken (https://www.gitkraken.com) or KrakenD (https://www.krakend.io)

Or Kraken the cryptocurrency exchange (https://www.kraken.com/)

Or kraken.io, the image optimizer. This cool name seems to be quite popular

Or kraken the rum (https://www.krakenrum.com/)

Or the original Kraken from H.P. Lovecraft

https://lovecraft.fandom.com/wiki/Cthylla

I definitely assumed this was git related before clicking

This is so cool.

Will I ever use it? Probably not, I’m a hobbyist at the moment. Do I think everything should be P2P, particularly if infrastructure-critical like a registry? Hell yes.

Most organizations are not Google or Facebook or Uber, so setting up a P2P network of registries is ghoulish overkill. Any image registry with a HA setup (e.g. API pods in Kubernetes and backing storage in Ceph or a NetApp cluster or whatever) is probably enough.

Source: I've implemented a federating image registry for use at $dayjob (https://github.com/sapcc/keppel). Before doing so, I evaluated the landscape and also looked at Kraken briefly.

Thanks for the keppel link. Impressive work.

Since you have experience writing your own registry, do you think it would be difficult to support IPFS (or a similar distributed storage technology) for pulling images? I'm thinking HTTP for metadata and IPFS for storage could reduce the load on registries significantly, but I know very little about registries.

Conceptually, no big deal. Most registries already deliver blob contents from a CDN or object store (via HTTP redirect). However, the registry protocol (i.e. the Open Containers Distribution API) only knows HTTP, so you'd have to use a HTTP-to-IPFS proxy to use the IPFS backing store with existing clients.

> Kraken's goal is to reduce global max download time and communication overhead in a stable environment, while BitTorrent was designed for an unpredictable and adversarial environment, so it needs to preserve more copies of scarce data and defend against malicious or bad behaving peers.

Looks like it can't just be deployed on the Internet for us to use as an alternative, it's mostly for trusted internal use. Too bad.

When I saw Dockerhub announce they are throttling pulls I did think using something like IPFS (InterPlanetary File System)[1] would be ideal for a public Docker image repository.

Dockerhub must be a huge expense for the free repositories, switching to P2P would significantly reduce the running costs.

[1] https://ipfs.io/

https://github.com/miguelmota/ipdr

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