DTR architecture

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Docker Trusted Registry (DTR) is a containerized application that runs on a Docker Universal Control Plane cluster.

Once you have DTR deployed, you use your Docker CLI client to login, push, and pull images.

Under the hood

For high-availability you can deploy multiple DTR replicas, one on each UCP worker node.

All DTR replicas run the same set of services and changes to their configuration are automatically propagated to other replicas.

DTR internal components

When you install DTR on a node, the following containers are started:

Name Description
dtr-api-<replica_id> Executes the DTR business logic. It serves the DTR web application, and API
dtr-garant-<replica_id> Manages DTR authentication
dtr-jobrunner-<replica_id> Runs cleanup jobs in the background
dtr-nginx-<replica_id> Receives http and https requests and proxies them to other DTR components. By default it listens to ports 80 and 443 of the host
dtr-notary-server-<replica_id> Receives, validates, and serves content trust metadata, and is consulted when pushing or pulling to DTR with content trust enabled
dtr-notary-signer-<replica_id> Performs server-side timestamp and snapshot signing for content trust metadata
dtr-registry-<replica_id> Implements the functionality for pulling and pushing Docker images. It also handles how images are stored
dtr-rethinkdb-<replica_id> A database for persisting repository metadata
dtr-scanningstore-<replica_id> Stores security scanning data

All these components are for internal use of DTR. Don’t use them in your applications.

Networks used by DTR

To allow containers to communicate, when installing DTR the following networks are created:

Name Type Description
dtr-ol overlay Allows DTR components running on different nodes to communicate, to replicate DTR data

Volumes used by DTR

DTR uses these named volumes for persisting data:

Volume name Description
dtr-ca-<replica_id> Root key material for the DTR root CA that issues certificates
dtr-notary-<replica_id> Certificate and keys for the Notary components
dtr-postgres-<replica_id> Vulnerability scans data
dtr-registry-<replica_id> Docker images data, if DTR is configured to store images on the local filesystem
dtr-rethink-<replica_id> Repository metadata
dtr-nfs-registry-<replica_id> Docker images data, if DTR is configured to store images on NFS

You can customize the volume driver used for these volumes, by creating the volumes before installing DTR. During the installation, DTR checks which volumes don’t exist in the node, and creates them using the default volume driver.

By default, the data for these volumes can be found at /var/lib/docker/volumes/<volume-name>/_data.

Image storage

By default, Docker Trusted Registry stores images on the filesystem of the node where it is running, but you should configure it to use a centralized storage backend.

DTR supports these storage backends:

  • NFS
  • Amazon S3
  • Cleversafe
  • Google Cloud Storage
  • OpenStack Swift
  • Microsoft Azure

How to interact with DTR

DTR has a web UI where you can manage settings and user permissions.

You can push and pull images using the standard Docker CLI client or other tools that can interact with a Docker registry.

Where to go next

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