2026-02 on Funky Si's Blog

Azure Container Registry vs AWS Elastic Container Registry: A Developer's Comparison

funkysi1701@gmail.com (funkysi1701) — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 20:00:00 +0000

As someone who works with both Azure and AWS regularly, I’ve had hands-on experience with both Azure Container Registry (ACR) and AWS Elastic Container Registry (ECR). Recently, while migrating my blog’s deployment pipeline to use ECR, I encountered some interesting differences that are worth sharing.

The Basics

Both services provide secure, private Docker container registries that integrate seamlessly with their respective cloud ecosystems. They’re designed to store, manage, and deploy container images for your applications.

Azure Container Registry (ACR)

Fully managed Docker registry service
Integrated with Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), Azure Container Instances, and other Azure services
Supports Docker images and OCI artifacts
Available in multiple tiers: Basic, Standard, Premium

AWS Elastic Container Registry (ECR)

Fully managed Docker container registry
Integrated with Amazon ECS, EKS, and AWS Lambda
Supports Docker images and OCI artifacts
Single pricing model with pay-as-you-go

OCI artifacts are container-related objects that follow the Open Container Initiative (OCI) specifications. Originally, OCI defined standards for Docker container images, but now it covers a broader range of artifacts—including Helm charts, software bill of materials (SBOMs), and other files—stored in container registries.

Pricing Comparison

This is where things get interesting.

Azure Container Registry

ACR uses a tiered pricing model:

Basic: £4.23/month + storage (£0.083/GB) + bandwidth
Standard: £16.93/month + storage (£0.083/GB) + bandwidth
Premium: £42.32/month + storage (£0.083/GB) + bandwidth + geo-replication

The Premium tier adds features like:

Geo-replication across Azure regions
Content trust for image signing
Private link with private endpoints
Enhanced throughput

AWS Elastic Container Registry

ECR uses simple pay-as-you-go pricing:

Storage: $0.10/GB per month (£0.08/GB)
Data Transfer: Standard AWS data transfer pricing
No base fee - you only pay for what you use

Authentication & Setup

This is where I hit some friction with ECR.

Azure Container Registry

ACR authentication is straightforward:

# Login using Azure CLI
az acr login --name myregistry

# Or use service principal
docker login myregistry.azurecr.io -u $SP_ID -p $SP_PASSWORD

# In pipelines, it's seamless with Azure DevOps tasks

The Azure DevOps integration is particularly smooth - the Docker@2 task handles authentication automatically when using service connections.

AWS Elastic Container Registry

ECR authentication requires an extra step:

# Get login password and pipe to docker login
aws ecr get-login-password --region eu-north-1 | \
 docker login --username AWS --password-stdin \
 111111111111.dkr.ecr.eu-north-1.amazonaws.com

In my Azure Pipelines, I had to:

Install AWS CLI (not included by default)
Configure AWS credentials as environment variables
Run the login command manually

- task: CmdLine@2
 displayName: "Install AWS CLI"
 inputs:
 script: |
 curl "https://awscli.amazonaws.com/awscli-exe-linux-x86_64.zip" -o "awscliv2.zip"
 unzip -q awscliv2.zip
 ./aws/install --bin-dir ~/.local/bin --install-dir ~/.local/aws-cli
 
- task: CmdLine@2
 displayName: "Login to ECR"
 env:
 AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID: $(AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID)
 AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY: $(AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY)
 inputs:
 script: |
 export PATH=$HOME/.local/bin:$PATH
 aws ecr get-login-password --region eu-north-1 | \
 docker login --username AWS --password-stdin \
 111111111111.dkr.ecr.eu-north-1.amazonaws.com

Winner: ACR (simpler authentication, especially in Azure DevOps)

Image Naming & URLs

Azure Container Registry

Clean, predictable naming:

myregistry.azurecr.io/myapp:v1.0.0
myregistry.azurecr.io/namespace/myapp:latest

AWS Elastic Container Registry

Includes your AWS account ID:

111111111111.dkr.ecr.eu-north-1.amazonaws.com/funkysi1701/blog:10.1.1.123-develop

The account ID in the URL may pose a security consideration - it’s visible to anyone who has access to your images or deployment configs. Attackers could use the account ID for targeted phishing, social engineering, or brute-force attacks. If combined with leaked credentials or misconfigured permissions, it makes it easier for someone to identify and target your AWS resources.

Winner: ACR (cleaner URLs)

Features Comparison

Feature	ACR	ECR
Image Scanning	✅ Premium tier	✅ Included
Vulnerability Scanning	✅ Premium tier	✅ Basic + Enhanced
Geo-Replication	✅ Premium tier	❌ Manual setup
Webhooks	✅ All tiers	✅ Included
Image Retention Policies	✅ All tiers	✅ Lifecycle policies
Private Endpoints	✅ Premium tier	✅ VPC endpoints
Image Signing	✅ Content Trust	✅ AWS Signer
Cross-Region Replication	✅ Premium	❌ Requires manual setup
Import from Docker Hub	✅ Built-in	❌ Manual

Integration with Kubernetes

ACR + AKS

Seamless integration with Azure Kubernetes Service:

# Attach ACR to AKS cluster
az aks update --name myaks --resource-group mygroup --attach-acr myregistry

AKS nodes can pull images without credentials. Magical.

ECR + EKS

Also integrated, but requires IAM roles:

# Attach IAM policy to EKS node role
aws iam attach-role-policy \
 --role-name eksNodeRole \
 --policy-arn arn:aws:iam::aws:policy/AmazonEC2ContainerRegistryReadOnly

Works well once configured, but requires understanding of AWS IAM.

Winner: Tie (both integrate well with their respective K8s offerings)

Developer Experience

What I Like About ACR

Simple authentication in Azure DevOps
Clean, readable image URLs
Excellent documentation
Azure Portal UI is intuitive
Helm chart support is first-class

What I Like About ECR

No minimum cost - truly pay-per-use
Built-in vulnerability scanning at all levels
AWS CLI is powerful and ubiquitous
Great for multi-cloud strategies
Excellent API and automation support

Pain Points

ACR:

Premium tier gets expensive for features that should be standard
Minimum £4/month even for tiny projects
Geo-replication requires Premium tier (£42/month)

Geo-replication is important because it allows your container images and artifacts to be stored and accessed in multiple geographic regions.

ECR:

Authentication is more complex outside AWS
Account ID in image URL
Requires AWS CLI installation in non-AWS CI/CD

My Real-World Experience

For my blog’s deployment pipeline, I recently migrated from ACR to ECR primarily for cost reasons. Here’s what I learned:

The Migration

Before (ACR):

Cost: ~£4.50/month (Basic tier + minimal storage)
Authentication: Seamless in Azure DevOps
Image URLs: Clean and simple

After (ECR):

Cost: £0/month (due to free trial)
Authentication: Required custom pipeline steps
Image URLs: Include AWS account ID

Was It Worth It?

For my small personal project, yes - saving money is meaningful. But the setup was more complex than I expected.

For enterprise workloads, I’d still choose ACR Premium if I needed:

Geo-replication
Content trust
Azure-native integration
Enterprise support

Recommendations

Choose ACR if

✅ You’re heavily invested in Azure ecosystem
✅ You need geo-replication
✅ You want seamless AKS integration
✅ You value simplified authentication
✅ You need Azure-native compliance features

Choose ECR if

✅ You want zero minimum costs
✅ You’re on AWS or multi-cloud
✅ You need built-in vulnerability scanning
✅ You prefer pay-per-use pricing
✅ You’re comfortable with IAM and AWS CLI

Conclusion

Both ACR and ECR are excellent services. Your choice should depend on:

Your cloud platform - Use the registry that matches your deployment target
Your budget - ECR wins for small projects, ACR Premium for enterprise features
Your team’s expertise - Stick with what your team knows
Your requirements - Need geo-replication? ACR Premium. Need low-cost? ECR.

For my personal projects, I’m happy with ECR’s cost savings. For enterprise work, I still recommend ACR Premium for its advanced features and Azure integration.

What’s your experience with container registries? Let me know in the comments!

Resources

NDC London 2026

funkysi1701@gmail.com (funkysi1701) — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 20:46:00 +0000

For the second year running, I had the privilege of volunteering at NDC London – one of Europe’s premier software development conferences. This year’s event was packed with insights on AI, accessibility, testing automation, and the future of software development. If you’re interested in my first experience, check out my 2025 report .

The volunteer experience was just as rewarding as last year – the team was fantastic, the energy was incredible, and the sense of community was palpable. In this post, I’ll focus on the talks I attended and the key insights I gained from them.

As I mentioned last year, volunteering gave me a superpower: increased confidence to network with speakers, vendors, fellow volunteers, and attendees. The connections you make at conferences like this are invaluable, and being part of the team made it even easier to engage with the community.

Wednesday

Let’s Break Some WCAG Rules (Speaker: Elise Kristiansen)

This eye-opening talk examined how pervasively websites violate Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). For those unfamiliar, WCAG provides a framework to make web content accessible to everyone, including people with disabilities. The guidelines are organized into three conformance levels:

Level A - The bare minimum requirements
Level AA - The legal requirement (what most laws mandate)
Level AAA - The gold standard, aspirational but not legally required

The statistics Elise shared were sobering: 15-25% of people have some form of disability (whether permanent, temporary, or situational), yet a staggering 94.8% of websites contain at least one WCAG AA violation – meaning they’re actually breaking the law.

One of the most powerful demonstrations was a colour blindness test where only colour blind individuals could read certain numbers. It really drove home how design choices can inadvertently exclude significant portions of our users.

Key Takeaways:

WCAG compliance isn’t optional – it’s a legal requirement and moral imperative
Stop using <div> for everything; HTML is semantically rich for a reason
Consider learning to use a screen reader to understand user experiences better
Accessibility benefits everyone, not just those with disabilities

A timely reminder that as soon as humans enter the equation, social engineering becomes a significant security risk. This talk explored various tactics malicious actors use to manipulate people into divulging confidential information or performing actions that compromise security.

Pawel demonstrated real-world scenarios like phishing emails that appear to come from trusted colleagues, pretexting phone calls where attackers impersonate IT support, and how seemingly innocent information shared on social media can be weaponized. The human element remains the weakest link in any security chain.

Supercharged Testing: AI-Powered Workflows with Playwright + MCP (Speaker: Debbie O’Brien)

I’d heard Debbie discuss the Playwright MCP (Model Context Protocol) on .NET Rocks, but seeing it demonstrated live was transformative. This session showed how AI can dramatically enhance testing workflows by understanding test intent and generating Playwright test code.

I’ve already started using it to write some tests for this very website!

Key Takeaway:

Experiment with the Playwright MCP – it’s a game-changer for test automation

The Undersea Cable Network (Speaker: Richard Campbell)

Richard took us on a fascinating journey through the history of undersea telecommunications cables – the literal backbone of the internet. He explored how these cables are laid, maintained, and the significant challenges when they’re damaged (whether accidental or deliberate). It’s humbling to realize that our globally connected world depends on physical cables crossing ocean floors.

Java Sucks (So C# Didn’t Have To) (Speaker: Adele Carpenter)

An entertaining and insightful exploration of Java’s history, examining how its early popularity locked in certain design decisions that became problematic over time. Adele showed how C# learned from Java’s mistakes and made different choices that enabled better evolution. The key lesson: early success can create technical debt that’s nearly impossible to pay down.

View the slides

Think Like a User: Practical UX Design Tips for Developers (Speaker: Lex Lofthouse)

This session challenged developers to shift perspectives and consider user experience from the ground up. Lex provided practical, actionable advice for creating more intuitive interfaces.

View the slides

Recommended Reading:

The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman

Thursday

OpenTelemetry At Scale 101: Intro to OpAMP (Speakers: Aakansha Priya and Adriana Villela)

This session introduced OpAMP (Open Agent Management Protocol) for managing OpenTelemetry collectors at scale. While the scale discussed was beyond my current needs, it was valuable to understand the challenges and solutions for production observability in large distributed systems.

A Defence of Technical Excellence (Speaker: Chris Simon)

Chris made a compelling argument for maintaining high technical standards even under pressure to deliver quickly. Technical excellence isn’t about perfectionism – it’s about sustainable, maintainable code that serves the business long-term.

How to Git Away with Murder (Speaker: Sergès Goma)

A humorous yet practical look at Git workflows and how to recover from common (and not-so-common) Git disasters. The Q&A session at the end turned into a group therapy session where attendees shared their most spectacular Git mishaps and recovery stories. If you’ve ever accidentally force-pushed to main, this talk was for you!

Code That Writes Code: .NET Source Generators (Speaker: Glenn F. Henriksen)

Source generators are one of .NET’s most powerful yet underutilized features. Glenn demonstrated how they can eliminate boilerplate, improve performance by moving work to compile-time, and create type-safe code generation patterns. This is definitely an area I need to explore more for my own projects.

Warm and Fuzzy: Semantic Search in .NET (Speaker: Jonathan “J.” Tower)

Jonathan delivered an excellent introduction to implementing semantic search using vector databases. He covered several options for .NET developers:

SQL Server 2025 with native vector support
Azure Cosmos DB for NoSQL vector storage
Qdrant as a specialized vector database

The talk also touched on Semantic Kernel, which is now part of the Microsoft Agent Framework – a significant development for building intelligent applications.

Action Items:

Implement semantic search for my blog to improve content discovery
Explore the demo code on GitHub

Coding 4 Fun: 8-bit Game Emulation in .NET (Speaker: Alex Thissen)

Pure fun! Alex walked through building an 8-bit game emulator in .NET, demonstrating low-level programming concepts in a modern language. A great reminder that not everything we build needs to be “enterprise-ready” – sometimes coding is just about learning and enjoyment. Lots of shifting bytes around, so a great example of the different things you can do with .NET.

Friday

Keynote: AI-Powered App Development (Speaker: Steve Sanderson)

Steve Sanderson delivered an inspiring keynote on how AI is transforming application development. The GitHub Copilot CLI was demonstrated, with a new feature added in front of our eyes. Hundreds of Pull Requests can be generated with AI, but they all need reviewing and maintaining by Software Developers and there are no easy answers for managing that.

What in the Hunger Games is Happening with Recruitment? (Speaker: Suzi Edwards-Alexander)

A frank and often amusing look at the current state of tech recruitment. Suzi traced how we arrived at today’s challenging hiring landscape – from the first interview questions created by Thomas Edison, to the rise of LinkedIn and modern recruitment processes. Recruitment is broken, and there are no easy ways of fixing it.

The Great Brain Robbery: Navigating the Dark Future of Online Manipulation (Speaker: Jeff Watkins)

A sobering examination of how online platforms use psychological manipulation and dark patterns to exploit users’ attention and data. Jeff didn’t just highlight the problems – he offered strategies for recognizing and resisting these tactics, both as developers and as users. This talk was rather bleak reinforcing the notion that you can not trust anything you see or read online.

Beyond the AI Hype: What’s Real, What’s Next (Speaker: Richard Campbell)

Richard cut through the AI hype to examine what’s genuinely transformative versus what’s just marketing. He explored current capabilities, realistic near-term developments, and the fundamental limitations we need to understand. A perfect counterbalance to the morning’s optimistic keynote – both perspectives are necessary for making informed decisions about AI adoption.

Resilient by Design (Speaker: Chris Ayers)

The final session I attended focused on building resilient systems in Azure from the ground up. Chris covered how much downtime you can have if your SLA is 99.99% (8.6s a day see uptime.is ) – but more importantly, the mindset shift required to design for failure rather than just success. In production, it’s not if things will fail, but when and how gracefully.

Networking Break: JetBrains Rider Team

I skipped one session to have an extended conversation with the JetBrains Rider team at their booth. These unstructured conversations are often where you get the most value at conferences – I am a big fan of Visual Studio, but I have never tried Rider, this informal chat has encouraged me to download Rider and give it a try.

Final Thoughts

NDC London 2026 was another incredible experience. The breadth of topics – from accessibility and UX to AI, observability, and system resilience – reflects the diverse skills modern developers need.

My key takeaways from this year:

Accessibility is non-negotiable – both legally and morally
AI tools are here to stay – learn to leverage them effectively
Technical excellence matters – shortcuts today become tomorrow’s technical debt
Community is everything – the conversations between sessions were as valuable as the talks themselves

Huge thanks to the NDC organizing team, my fellow volunteers, all the speakers who shared their knowledge, and the attendees who made this such an engaging event. If you get the chance to attend (or volunteer at) NDC Conferences , I highly recommend it.

Interested in attending NDC London 2027? Follow @NDC_Conferences for updates!

See you at NDC London 2027! 🚀

2026-02 on Funky Si's Blog

Azure Container Registry vs AWS Elastic Container Registry: A Developer's Comparison

The Basics

Azure Container Registry (ACR)

AWS Elastic Container Registry (ECR)

Pricing Comparison

Azure Container Registry

AWS Elastic Container Registry

Authentication & Setup

Azure Container Registry

AWS Elastic Container Registry

Image Naming & URLs

Azure Container Registry

AWS Elastic Container Registry

Features Comparison

Integration with Kubernetes

ACR + AKS

ECR + EKS

Developer Experience

What I Like About ACR

What I Like About ECR

Pain Points

My Real-World Experience

The Migration

Was It Worth It?

Recommendations

Choose ACR if

Choose ECR if

Conclusion

Resources

NDC London 2026

Wednesday

Let’s Break Some WCAG Rules (Speaker: Elise Kristiansen)

Social Engineering: Hacking Humans (Speaker: Pawel Sucholbiak)

Supercharged Testing: AI-Powered Workflows with Playwright + MCP (Speaker: Debbie O’Brien)

The Undersea Cable Network (Speaker: Richard Campbell)

Java Sucks (So C# Didn’t Have To) (Speaker: Adele Carpenter)

Think Like a User: Practical UX Design Tips for Developers (Speaker: Lex Lofthouse)

Thursday

OpenTelemetry At Scale 101: Intro to OpAMP (Speakers: Aakansha Priya and Adriana Villela)

A Defence of Technical Excellence (Speaker: Chris Simon)

How to Git Away with Murder (Speaker: Sergès Goma)

Code That Writes Code: .NET Source Generators (Speaker: Glenn F. Henriksen)

Warm and Fuzzy: Semantic Search in .NET (Speaker: Jonathan “J.” Tower)

Coding 4 Fun: 8-bit Game Emulation in .NET (Speaker: Alex Thissen)

Friday

Keynote: AI-Powered App Development (Speaker: Steve Sanderson)

What in the Hunger Games is Happening with Recruitment? (Speaker: Suzi Edwards-Alexander)

The Great Brain Robbery: Navigating the Dark Future of Online Manipulation (Speaker: Jeff Watkins)

Beyond the AI Hype: What’s Real, What’s Next (Speaker: Richard Campbell)

Resilient by Design (Speaker: Chris Ayers)

Networking Break: JetBrains Rider Team

Final Thoughts