Image Registry for Air Gap Clusters

The app manager can be used to download and prepare an application to be installed onto a secured, air gapped Kubernetes cluster. When doing this, there are a few additional steps and configuration needed.

Docker Image Registry Requirements

To install an application into an air gapped network, you must have a docker image registry that is available inside the network. The app manager rewrites the application image names in all application manifests to read from the on-prem registry, and it retags and pushes the images to the on-prem registry. When authenticating to the registry, credentials with push permissions are required.

A single application expects to use a single “namespace” in the docker image registry.

The namespace name can be any valid URL-safe string, supplied at installation time. Keep in mind that a registry typically expects the namespace to exist before any images can be pushed into it.

Note: ECR does not use namespaces.

Docker Image Registry Compatibility

The app manager has been tested for compatibility with the following registries:

• Docker Hub

  Note: To avoid the November 20, 2020 Docker Hub rate limits, use the kots docker ensure-secret CLI command. For more information, see Avoiding Docker Hub rate limits.

• Quay

• Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR)

• Google Container Registry (GCR)

• Harbor

• Sonatype Nexus