Component Infrastructure

Some components are not strictly required for an OpenShift installation, but their integration will improve user's experiences when operating OpenShift on an infrastructure provider.

Image Registry

OpenShift contains a component named the Image Registry Operator which is responsible for managing a singleton instance of the OpenShift registry. This operator will manage a container image registry for the OpenShift cluster which will provide persistent storage for ImageStreams, built images (from Builds and BuildConfigs), and intermediate images produced during build processes.

By default, the operator will deploy an image registry that is supported by local, ephemeral, storage. This means that if the node containing the registy is rebooted, then the cached images will be lost. This configuration is not supported by Red Hat and is only added as default on new platforms to aid with building the platform. It must be changed before the new platform will be considered complete for general availability.

Infrastructure providers can improve performance for their users by integrating an infrastructure specific storage configuration for the image registry operator. With proper integration to a storage service, images will be available in a persistent local storage. If the new infrastructure platform will not provide the storage for the image registry, then this component must be removed by default.

For more information on how the image registry operator works, including instructions for development, please see the project documentation.

For more information on how the integrated registry works in OpenShift, please see the OpenShift product documentation.

To see examples of previous infrastructure integrations with the image registry operator, please see the follow pull requests: