Today we’re excited to announce that all 9,000+ bioinformatics containers in the BioContainers community are available in Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR) Public Gallery, a managed AWS container image registry service that is secure, scalable, and reliable.
BioContainers is a community-driven project that provides the infrastructure and guidelines to create, manage, and distribute bioinformatics tools and applications in a variety of containerized formats, including and Docker and Singularity. BioContainers have long been available at Docker Hub and Quay.io, but today’s announcement means having them available in ECR Public Gallery which is super-fast to access from your pipelines running on services like AWS Batch, in AWS ParallelCluster, or natively on Amazon EC2.
Like many other container registries, you don’t need an AWS account to search for – or access – container images. ECR Public Gallery comes with a generous free use tier. When you pull an image from ECR Public Gallery anonymously across the internet, you’ll get 500 GB of free downloads each month. If you use your AWS account to sign the pull request, that free download cap increases to 5 TB per month.
Importantly, your workloads running on AWS get unlimited data bandwidth from any region when pulling from ECR Public Gallery. This means that your bioinformatics workflows won’t be slowed down by container pulls from registries who put rate limits on pulls.
Using BioContainers from ECR Public
ECR Public uses Amazon CloudFront to cache images across the globe, putting that data close to you and your cloud workloads. It’s simple to use — just add the global prefix public.ecr.aws/to container IDs in your scripts and workflows. For instance, instead of pulling the BLAST container from DockerHub like this…
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