News

Red Hat Releases Open Source Project Quay Container Registry

• By John K. Waters
• November 14, 2019

Red Hat this week unveiled an open source distribution of the Red Hat Quay container image registry, dubbed Project Quay, which includes the Quay code base, as well as the Clair container vulnerability scanner and the tooling needed to build, deploy, and run a completely open source Quay distribution.

Launched in 2013, Quay is an enterprise-centric container image registry, one of the first private hosted registries on the market. It was acquired by CoreOS in 2014 to support its mission to secure the Internet through automated operations. Both the Quay and Clair technologies were added to Red Hat's product portfolio last year with its acquisition of CoreOS, and the integrated solutions became the on-premise offering called Red Hat Quay.

Going forward, both Red Hat Quay and Quay.io will build from the work done in Project Quay," said Quay co-creator Joey Schorr (with Jake Moshenko) in a blog post. Quay.io will be built and deployed from the upstream project. Red Hat Quay will continue to be managed, built, and released by Red Hat on its current release schedule.

"Quay and Clair have always been closely aligned as projects," Schorr said. "Clair enables the container security scanning feature in Red Hat Quay, which helps users identify known vulnerabilities in their container registries. Clair was created in the open source community in an effort to improve security through open work amongst vendors and users alike. With increased security needs in mind, Clair is also directly built into Project Quay."

"We believe together the projects will benefit the cloud-native community to lower the barrier to innovation around containers, helping to make containers more secure and accessible," Schorr added.