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Amazon Web Services' (AWS) has launched a simpler way for developers to manage Docker containers on its cloud platform.

The EC2 Container Registry (ECR) gives developers an AWS-hosted registry to manage, store and deploy Docker images.

The service aims to ease the pain of running a private Docker registry, which adds complexity when deploying container images to EC2 clusters spread across multiple AWS regions.

In October AWS revealed the service, with Amazon CTO Dr. Werner Vogels describing it as "one of the core pieces missing in EC2", adding that it would help developers when testing and storing container images.

ECR hosts container images on AWS's EC2 infrastructure and allows developers to share these images based on roles defined in AWS's identity and access management service. It also integrates with Amazon's EC2 Container Service (ECS) and the Docker command line interface (CLI).

"You can easily push your container images to Amazon ECR using the Docker CLI from your development machine, and Amazon ECS can pull them directly for production deployments," said Andrew Thomas, AWS' director for engineering and operations for anti-DDoS.

The company also announced a new partnership with TwistLock to provide vulnerability scanning of images in ECR.

"This makes it even easier for developers to evaluate potential security threats before pushing to Amazon ECR and allows developers to monitor their containers running in production," Thomas noted.

For now, the AWS hosted container registry is only available in the US East region in Northern Virginia, however it will be rolling out to other regions soon.

Pricing is based on storage used to house images and the amount of data transferred. Storage is set at $0.10 per GB-month.

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