> Just imagine the vast number of poorly cached CI jobs pulling gigabytes from Docker hub on every commit, coupled with naive aproaches to CI/CD when doing micr

> Just imagine the vast number of poorly cached CI jobs pulling gigabytes from Docker hub on every commit, coupled with naive aproaches to CI/CD when doing microservices, prod/dev/test deployments, etc. I hit the rate limits that others talk of in the comments, which motivated me to use Nexus for both proxying and storing my own container images. I actually tried using GitLab Registry before, but something with a bit more flexibility (cleanup policies) is nice! So far, it's been pretty good, I actually wrote about the process on my blog, "Moving from GitLab Registry to Sonatype Nexus": https://blog.kronis.dev/tutorials/moving-from-gitlab-registry-to-sonatype-nexus https://blog.kronis.dev/tutorials/moving-from-gitlab-registr... Another thing that I tried, however, was to only rely upon Docker Hub for the base images that I want (Ubuntu in my case) and then build everything I need on top of that, doing things like installing Java/Node/Python/Ruby/... manually, adding utilities I want across all of the images etc. Once again, I wrote about it on my blog, "Using Ubuntu as the base for all of my containers": https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/using-ubuntu-as-the-base-for-all-of-my-containers https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/using-ubuntu-as-the-base-fo... That approach is absolutely more work, but also is something that's underexplored and works really nicely for me. Now I mostly rely on the OS package manager repositories (or mirrors of those), put less load on Docker Hub, don't risk running into its rate limits and also have common base layers across most of the images that I build, which in practice means less data actually needing to be downloaded to any of the servers where I want to utilize my images. Of course, the downside is that getting something like PHP running was an absolute pain (tried with Apache, didn't work for some reason, then moved over to Nginx), and I technically miss out on some of the more complex space optimizations because if you look at the Dockerfiles for some of the more popular images, like OpenJDK, you'll occasionally see some interesting approaches, like getting the software package as a bunch of files and "installing" them directly, as opposed to using something like apt/yum: https://github.com/adoptium/containers/blob/08dd7d416cee0fe00f1231351b521d577450133f/17/jdk/ubuntu/jammy/Dockerfile.releases.full https://github.com/adoptium/containers/blob/08dd7d416cee0fe0... Then again, personally I'd much prefer to rely on packages that I can get from something like apt directly, even if some of those versions can be a bit older (or add the project's official apt repositories as needed). One exception for software I don't install myself: databases, due to how good the majority of images out there (e.g. MySQL/PostgreSQL) are already. I just proxy/re-host those with different tags as needed.