Migrate "App Engine Standard" away from"Container Registry?" (for "Artifact Registry")

Question

An email just went out about how this migration needs to happen, but it's not entirely clear how this affects App Engine Standard. I have a couple of small things running on that, and the only thing I see in the Container Registry is the app-engine-tmp folder.

Do we just delete that folder? Are new deployments from now on going to use Artifact Registry? More information would be great from anyone who might know!

Urethroscope

I'm also confused, since we only interface with app engine. Do we need to migrate all of our app engine projects to new app engine projects? I'm reluctant to change around the internals especially if app engine attempts a future migration of some kind. I'm concerned about adding new regions to our app engine projects, I'm wondering if there will now be any incompatibility between regions. Maybe only for automated rollback usecases? Since the new regions will automatically use Artifact Registry, if I understand correctly – Spancake

Answer 1

The announced change does not affect any projects that are currently using Container Registry. Only projects not using Container Registry by May 2024 will be affected and they will use automatically use Artifact Registry for App Engine.

If you want to make a similar change to existing projects, you can follow the steps in https://cloud.google.com/artifact-registry/docs/transition/setup-gcr-repo Doing this will completely remove Container Registry usage from the project and use Artifact Registry for both gcr.io and pkg.dev urls (and App Engine)

-James (Artifact Registry Engineer)

Saad

Thanks for your answer! Someone else had a comment on the OP in case you have a sec to check it out. – Urethroscope

What I understand is that Container Registry as of 2023 July has no free tier. So if we are trying to keep our apps in free limits, it is important to migrate to Artifact Registry cloud.google.com/functions/… – Alla

@James, there is a new announcement in 2024 that Container Registry will cease operation in 2025. What should an existing App Engine project do? Should we just run the default auto-migration tool (cloud.google.com/artifact-registry/docs/transition/…)? – Autism

Yes, I would recommend running the default migration tool. It's possible that app engine will migrate automatically, but most people can migrate with the tool very easily and then you don't have to worry about the GCR turndown anymore – Saad

Answer 2

You don't need to modify anything in your current project. The announcement said that once Container Registry is phased out, you can no longer host new Container Registry. But your existing Container Registry will remain and co-exist with the new Artifact Registry. All images will automatically be hosted in Artifact Registry which is just a Container Registry with additional feature and benefits. You can check this for more details. 

Shotten