EventBridge Support in Amazon Elastic Container Registry

Many of our customers require a secure and private place to store their container images, and that’s why they use our fully managed container registry Amazon Elastic Container Registry (Amazon ECR). We recently added support for Amazon EventBridge so that you can trigger actions when images are pushed or deleted. These actions can trigger a continuous integration, continuous deployment pipeline when an image is pushed or post a message to your DevOps team Slack channel when an image has been deleted.

This new capability can even enable complicated workflows, for example, customers can use the image push event on a base image to trigger a rebuild of images built on top of that base. In this scenario, a base image might be rebuilt weekly to pick up the latest security patches. A push event from the base image repository can trigger other builds, so that all derivative images are patched, too.

To show you how to go about using this new capability, I thought I’d open up the console and work through an example of how all the pieces fit together.

In the Amazon EventBridge console, I create a new rule, and I enter a unique name and description.

Next, I scroll down to Define pattern and begin to customise the type of event pattern that I want to use. I leave the default Event pattern radio button selected and also that I want to use a Pre-defined patten by service. Since Elastic Container Registry is an AWS service, I select AWS as the Service Provider.

In the Service Name section, you can select one of the many different AWS services as the event source. I am going to choose the newest addition to this list Elastic Container Registry (ECR). Lastly, in this section, I select ECR Image Action as the Event type. This ECR Image Action contains both DELETE and PUSH as action types.

Next, I’m asked to configure which event bus I want to use. For this example, I select the AWS default event bus that comes with every AWS account.

Now that I have identified where my events are coming from, I now need to say where I want them to go. We call these targets, and there are plenty of options here. For example, I could send the event to a Lambda Function, a Kinesis stream, or any one of the wide variety of AWS targets.

To keep things simple, I’m going to choose to invoke a Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) topic. This topic is called ImageAction, and I have subscribed to this topic so that I receive an email when new messages are received by this topic.

Back over on my laptop, I push a new version of my container to my repository in to Elastic Container Registry.

If I go over to the Elastic Container Registry console, I can see that my Docker Image was successfully pushed, I’m now going to select the image and click the Delete button, which will delete my new image.

This will have sent both a PUSH and a DELETE event through to my SNS topic which in turn deliver two emails to me as a subscriber to that topic.

If I open up Outlook, sure enough, I have two (admittedly not pretty) emails that have both the respective action-type of PUSH and DELETE.

So there you have it, you can now wire up events in Elastic Container Registry and enable exciting and wonderful things to happen as a result. Amazon EventBridge support in Amazon Elastic Container Registry (Amazon ECR) is available in all public AWS Regions and GovCloud (US). Try it now in the Amazon EventBridge console.

Happy Eventing!

— Martin