A nice selling point for me is the registry. If you have a public image, it's totally free. If it's private, you can pay to use it privately in a team.
Of course, you can mount your own (it's a docker image, after all), or you can use Google or Amazon to host it, but it is much easier to pay them to host, and you don't need to bother with storage, backups, or authentication. Setting up team permissions is as easy as sending an invitation from the panel.
Just want to chime in and say running your own registry is actually really easy. It's literally a simple compose file and a bunch of env vars to configure.
It's has letsencrypt built in along with a few options for file storage, including AWS/gcloud.
Getting up and running with your own registry shouldn't really take longer than half an hour. The config docs for the registry image are really helpful with this too.
But for a company it's almost always cheaper to pay for the service.
That way you don't have to deal with maintenance, setting up redundancy, mirroring, etc.
That said, aws, google and quay are all competitors in this space.
I set my companies up almost a year ago, had to deal with it about once.
The docs cover a HA setup (if you really need it - most won't), data backups aren't really needed if you're using a storage backing, and I just use local file system - absolute worst case I have to wait half an hour to rebuild and push everything.
The downside risk of running your own is very low. The upside is a few bucks and you have your own private registry local to your network.
Just as a small note, data backup isn't just for hardware or service failure, it's also for ooops I just deleted my bucket. Yes you can rebuild, but that in my case would take quite a few days and money in compute. That having been said hosted services are actually worse in protecting your self from user error...
Where I work we've (relatively) recently migrated to using GitLab EE which comes with its own container registry[1]. I have no idea how much work it is behind the scenes from my perspective it has been flawless and much more convenient.
We've been using it where I work for a few months and have recently moved to Artifactory. Mainly because GitLab's registry makes it very very painful to remove old images, (you have to remove them from the UI one by one), especially when the number of registries and images grows.
Hmm, GKE's Container Registry also takes care of storage, backups, and authentication. Presumably Quay and Amazon's Container Registry do as well. What makes Docker, Inc.'s registry special?
Chiming in from Australia. Even considering the fact we have horrific internet anyway, the lack of Australian registry mirrors means that a Docker pull can take ~5 minutes for something like ubuntu:16.04. Docker pushes of ~100MB can take hours. That's just not acceptable.
I also contribute to Docker and other container technologies, and I cannot express in words how horrifically long the Dockerfile-based build and integration testing process takes. It takes about an hour in America, and more than double that in Australia.
