Automating Your Container Registry: Image and Tag Retention Policies

A busy CI/CD pipeline is a sign of a healthy project. With every commit build, new game server images are created, tagged, and pushed to a container registry. While this rapid iteration is great for development velocity, it can lead to a significant, perhaps even overlooked, operational challenge: registry bloat. Over time, your registry can become cluttered with innumerable old, untagged, or superseded images, leading to increased storage costs, security risks, and a confusing mess for your developers trying to find the correct artifacts.

Manually cleaning up these images is a tedious and error-prone task that no developer wants to add to their sprint. Recognizing this common pain point, GameFabric has introduced a powerful new feature designed to solve this problem: Image and Tag Retention Policies.

This new toolset, manageable via both the UI and API, allows developers and DevOps teams to define automated rules for managing their artifact lifecycle, ensuring a clean, cost-effective, and secure container registry.

GameFabric’s retention policies provide a flexible way to automate the cleanup process. Instead of manual deletion, you can create rules that automatically prune images and tags based on criteria you define, giving you full control over your artifact lifecycle. 

This system is built around:

Keep by Quantity

You can specify the exact number of the most recent images to keep. For example, a policy can be set to keep the 5 most recent images. This is useful for maintaining a rolling history of your latest production build.

Keep by Age

You can define a maximum age for an image. Any image older than the specified duration (e.g., 90 days) will be automatically targeted for deletion. This is an excellent way to ensure that very old, likely irrelevant, images are systematically cleared out.

Target with Precision using Regex

Using Regular Expressions (Regex), you can create highly specific policies that apply only to certain images or tags. This allows you to create different rules for different types of builds.

GameFabric will never delete container images that are currently in use, as they remain exempt from your implemented retention policies.

A clean container registry is a necessity for a mature and efficient DevOps workflow. With the introduction of Image and Tag Retention Policies, GameFabric transforms this cardinal task from a manual chore into a fully automated process. By giving developers the tools to define their own lifecycle rules, GameFabric maintains a more secure, cost-effective, and streamlined development pipeline, allowing you to focus your time and energy on what you do best.

Reach out today for your personalized GameFabric demo and feel the power of an automated, unified platform.