Exercise - Replicate a container image to different Azure regions

Completed

Let's say you have compute workloads deployed to several regions. You can use Azure Container Registry to place a container registry in each region where images run. This strategy allows for network-close operations and enables fast and reliable image layer transfers.

Geo-replication enables a container registry to function as a single registry that serves several regions with multi-master regional registries.

A geo-replicated registry provides the following benefits:

• Use single registry/image/tag names across multiple regions.
• Network-close registry access from regional deployments.
• No extra egress fees, as images are pulled from a local, replicated registry in the same region as the container host.
• Single management of a registry across multiple regions.

Create a replicated region for an Azure Container Registry

1. Replicate your registry to another region using the az acr replication create command. In this example, we replicate to the japaneast region.

   az acr replication create --registry $ACR_NAME --location japaneast
   

   Your output should look similar to the following condensed example output:

   {
     ...
     resourceGroups/learn-acr-rg/providers/Microsoft.ContainerRegistry/registries/myuniqueacrname/replications/japaneast",
     "location": "japaneast",
     "name": "japaneast",
     "provisioningState": "Succeeded",
      "regionEndpointEnabled": true,
      "resourceGroup": "learn-acr-rg",
     ...
   }
   

2. View all the container image replicas using the az acr replication list command.

   az acr replication list --registry $ACR_NAME --output table
   

   Your output should look similar to the following example output:

   NAME       LOCATION    PROVISIONING STATE    STATUS    REGION ENDPOINT ENABLED
   ---------  ----------  -------------------   -------   ------------------------
   japaneast  japaneast   Succeeded             Ready     True
   eastus     eastus      Succeeded             Ready     True
   

You can also use the Azure portal to view your container images by navigating to your container registry and selecting Geo-replications:

Clean up resources

Remove the resources you created in this module to avoid incurring charges. Deleting the resource group also deletes all its associated resources.

1. Navigate to the Azure Cloud Shell.

2. Delete the resource group using the az group delete command.

   az group delete --name learn-acr-rg --yes --no-wait 
   

Learn more

Learn more about Azure Container Registry and Docker on Azure with the following resources:

• Azure Container Registry (ACR) documentation
• Docker on Azure