A good six months after the last big release, cloud native registry project Harbor has hit v1.8, upping the ante on replication, automation, and authentication.

The team behind the project has used the time to enhance the Harbor-to-Harbor replication feature to give users of public clouds and the registries that go along with it the chance to use the project for vulnerability scanning, compliance enforcement and similar tasks. In version 1.8 Harbour is ready to do resource replication between itself and the Huawei Cloud Registry, Docker Hub, and the Docker Registry.

To make authentication easier, administrators can now choose to use an OpenID Connect provider to facilitate single sign-on. CLI secrets provide end users with a token to make sure the registry can also be accessed via Docker or Helm clients.

Another single sign-on difficulty often came up when using Harbor in concert with continuous integration or deployment tooling. Hence v1.8 also comes with the option of setting up special accounts for automated systems. These robot accounts can be used to generate tokens to allow the pulling and pushing of images.

Speaking of automation, admins can now use cron strings for defining job schedules in the Harbor UI. There’s also a health check API to get information on the status of the project’s different components.

Harbor is an open source project that started out at VMware in 2014. It joined the sandbox of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation in summer 2018 and was moved into the foundation’s incubator in November 2018.

The step into the CNCF and up the project ladder seems to have delivered on the often mentioned project visibility at least, since the announcement of v1.8 specifically mentions the high number of community contributions for the current release. If all goes according to plan, we’ll see the graduation of the registry by the end of next year – the CNCF generally plans for projects to take about two years to get to that final stage.