Amazon Web Services (AWS) launched its Amazon Elastic Container Registry Public (ECR Public) that allows developers to share and deploy container images publicly to construct their applications. The launch, which was part of this week’s virtual AWS re:Invent, also provides an avenue to bypass a recently instituted fee structure put in place by Docker Inc. for its widely used Docker Hub platform.

ECR Public acts as an image repository that can be shared by developers to construct their container-based applications. It acts a public version of AWS’ already offered private ECR Registry. Amazon noted that customers download more than 3 billion images from the private repository every week.

Users can also access a website – Amazon ECR Public Gallery – that hosts the public container images, allowing them to view image details and how to pull the images. ECR Public also automatically replicates container images across two AWS regions to speed up the access to those images.

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.

Amazon had previously noted that the platform also allows users to circumvent Docker Inc.’s controversial implementation of a tiered pricing structure for access to its Docker Hub image repository.

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,” explained Omar Paul, product manager at AWS, in a blog post last month, 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. And Docker Inc. has since made a big push to highlight that the move would only impact a small percentage of high-volume users.

Docker Inc.’s CEO Scott Johnston explained during a virtual roundtable that the move was needed so that the company could focus 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. That included 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.