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Build a highly available Docker Registry on AWS with Sonatype Nexus Repository

Have you ever wondered how you can build a highly available and resilient Docker Repository to store your Docker Images?

In this article, we will setup an EC2 instance inside a Security Group and create an A record pointing to the server Elastic IP address as follows:

To provision the infrastructure, we will use Terraform as IaC (Infrastructure as Code) tool. The advantage of using this kind of tools is the ability to spin up a new environment quickly in different AWS region (or different IaaS provider) in case of incident (Disaster recovery).

Editor's note: This article is a contribution from a Nexus Community member. If you have questions or feedback, please continue the discussion in the comments section below.

Start by cloning the following GitHub repository:

Inside docker-registry folder, update the variables.tfvars with your own AWS credentials (make sure you have the right IAM policies).

I specified a shell script to be used as user_data when launching the instance. It will simply install the latest version of Docker CE and turn the instance to Docker Swarm Mode (to benefit from replication & high availability of Nexus container).

Note: Surely, you can use a Configuration Management Tools like Ansible or Chef to provision the server once created.

Then, issue the following command to create the infrastructure:

Once created, you should see the Elastic IP of your instance.

Connect to your instance via SSH:

Verify that the Docker Engine is running in Swarm Mode.

Check if Nexus service is running.

If you go back to your AWS Management Console. Then, navigate to Route53 Dashboard, you should see a new A record has been created which points to the instance IP address.

Point your favorite browser to the Nexus Dashboard URL(registry.slowcoder.com:8081). Login and create a Docker hosted registry as below.

Edit the /etc/docker/daemon.json file, it should have the following content:

Note: For production it’s highly recommended to secure your registry using a TLS certificate issued by a known CA.

Restart Docker for the changes to take effect:

Login to your registry with Nexus Credentials (admin/admin123).

In order to push a new image to the registry:

 

Verify that the image has been pushed to the remote repository.

To pull the Docker image:

 

Note: Sometimes you end up with many unused and dangling images that can quickly take significant amount of disk space.

You can either use the Nexus CLI tool or create a Nexus Task to cleanup old Docker Images.

Populate the form as below.

The task above will run everyday at midnight to purge unused docker images from "mlabouardy" registry.

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Written by Mohamed Labouardy

Mohamed is Software Engineer/DevOps at InterCloud. Interested in AWS, Docker, Android, Go & ChatOps. A contributor to numerous open-source projects including Telegraf, DialogFlow, Docker ... He is currently writing a book on Serverless architecture in AWS, blogs at labouardy.com. You can reach him ...