Hacker News Reader

Maybe it’s time to reflect upon the reliance on centralized services? Not long ago docker hub started rate limiting access and we all turned to blanket solutions like the GitLab registry cache. I wonder if the IPFS distributed docker registry thing still exists/works.

View on HN

This isn't really about centralization. ISPs are blocking at the IP level, not Docker Hub specifically. You could self-host a registry behind Cloudflare and still run into the same thing.

Self-hosting a registry is objectively “less bad” than relying entirely on docker hub but, unless all your Dockerfiles start with `FROM scratch` you’ll still need access to Docker Hub to pull the base images and their updates, and that’s true regardless of how many people are running their own registries. If instead of relying on a centralized registry, which just so happens to also depend on a centralized CDN, you could instead pull images using something like IPFS or even torrent, not only ISP IP banlists wouldn’t be an issue but you would also eliminate a whole bunch of failure modes from the system.

I posted another comment[0] about this, but if you already have the images locally then you can push them directly to the target server without needing a separate registry.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47750927

"Behind Cloudflare" is the centralisation part

Reply on news.ycombinator.com