Amazon Web Services (AWS) is set to circumvent a recently instituted fee structure put in place by Docker Inc. that will allow developers to share and deploy container images publicly to construct their applications.

Omar Paul, product manager at AWS, noted in a blog post that it will unveil a new public cloud registry “within weeks.” It will allow developers to “to store, manage, share, and deploy container images for anyone to discover and download.”

“Developers will be able to use AWS to host both their private and public container images, eliminating the need to use different public websites and registries,” Paul explained. “Public images will be geo-replicated for reliable availability around the world and offer fast downloads to quickly serve up images on-demand.”

Access to browse and pull containerized images will be open to developers regardless as to whether they have an AWS account. However, workloads running in AWS will get unlimited data bandwidth from any region when pulling publicly shared images hosted on AWS.

Developers that share public images on AWS will receive 50 gigabytes (GB) of free storage each month, but will be charged for any excess storage needs. Anonymous access to images, meaning that someone who doesn’t sign into an AWS account, will receive 500 GB of free data bandwidth each month. Signing into an account will increase that bandwidth to 5 terabytes (TB) when pulling images from the internet.

Paul noted in the post that the move was tied to Docker Inc.’s recent pricing change. That change, which was announced earlier this year, implements progressive rate limiting on image pulls from Docker Hub for anonymous and free authenticated customers. The limits are not being imposed on Docker Inc.’s paid accounts, which typically run between $5 and $7 per month.

“Once fully in place, free plan anonymous use will be limited to 100 pulls per six hours, free plan authenticated accounts limited to 200 pulls per six hours, and Pro and Team accounts will not see any rate limits,” Paul explained, adding that AWS customers could see some of their applications and tools that use public images from Docker Hub “to face throttling errors.”

AWS, Google Cloud, and Red Hat, among others, have put out tips for developers for limiting the impact.

Docker Inc.’s move drew considerable consternation via social media channels.

Docker Inc.’s CEO Scott Johnston last week held a virtual roundtable that was both to tout the company’s realignment progress and to work in more details regarding the rate limiting move. He explained that Docker Inc. needed to be focused on providing a sustainable business model.

“And that, based on economic realities, is not sustainable, particularly when not only do we have tens of millions of developers today, but we expect tens of millions of more developers tomorrow to be joining us,” Johnston explained.

As part of that roundtable, Johnston also released a blog post touting increased Docker usage over the past year. This includes a 70% year-over-year increase in image pulls per month to 13.6 billion.

Docker Inc. last year sold off its Enterprise business to Mirantis as part of a broader corporate restructuring. This included its halo Docker Enterprise Technology Platform and associated intellectual property.

Docker Inc. CEO at that time Rob Bearden explained that the moves are part of the company’s “next phase of its growth” targeted at the developer community. This will include the company maintaining a focus in the Docker Desktop and Docker Hub assets.

Bearden also announced at that time that Johnston would take over as CEO. Bearden had held that top position for less than 8 months.

Amazon’s latest move also comes just a few months after it struck a deal with Docker to make it easier for developers to deploy and manage containers between Docker Compose, Docker Desktop, and Docker Hub and AWS’ Elastic Container Service (ECS) and ECS running on AWS’ Fargate container deployment service.

Docker Inc. had not responded by press time as to what impact AWS' move might have on that agreement or its broader operations.