Google Artifact Registry

You deployed version 1.2 last week, but now you need to roll back and the original container image is gone — it was overwritten in a local registry that nobody maintained. Meanwhile, another team can't pull your shared library because the artifact server went down overnight.

Early teams often relied on Docker Hub or improvised file stores, but as internal images and packages multiplied, access control, regional placement, and supply-chain traceability became much more important. Dedicated artifact repositories became part of the default delivery stack.

Build pipelines push images or packages into Artifact Registry repositories, and runtimes fetch them by tag or digest. Repository-level permissions and version history make it easier to enforce team boundaries and deployment rules.

Artifact Registry and Cloud Storage both store files, but Artifact Registry manages versioned deployment artifacts with package metadata, while Cloud Storage stores general-purpose objects. Use Artifact Registry when deployment artifact management is the main concern; use Cloud Storage when generic object storage is the need.

A good fit for repeated container and package delivery workflows. It is not ideal for simply storing backups or arbitrary static files.