Amazon ECR Replication Backfill: Replicate Existing Images with One API Call

Hi everyone, Shii-chan here! Today's news is a handy Amazon ECR update that answers the question: what about the images I already have?

AWS What's New aws.amazon.com

What was announced?

In AWS What's New, Amazon Elastic Container Registry (Amazon ECR) now supports replication backfill. It replicates existing images in your private registry to your configured replication destinations.

The story so far

Until now, replication only applied to images pushed after the replication configuration was enabled.

To replicate images that already existed, you had to manually retag them to trigger replication, which was a hassle.

What changes

With backfill, you can replicate your full image catalog to new or existing destinations with a single API call.

The announcement lists these use cases:

• Expanding to a new AWS Region
• Validating disaster recovery readiness
• Updating replication rules
• Keeping complete image catalogs across Regions for compliance

Dive Deep

Here are the operational details:

• You can run up to ten backfill jobs concurrently
• New APIs let you monitor progress and per-image results
• You can stop a job at any time without deleting images that were already replicated
• It's available in all AWS Regions where Amazon ECR is available

The announcement doesn't list specific API names or parameters, so check the Amazon ECR user guide when you try it.

Wrap-up

• Images pushed before replication was set up can now be replicated with one API call
• Up to ten concurrent jobs, with dedicated APIs for progress and results
• Stopping a job keeps what has already been copied
• Available in all Regions where ECR is available

If you run multi-Region setups or DR, this one is for you!