Container company Docker has given a stay of execution to petabytes of dusty images cluttering up its Hub store, which were due to be deleted on 1 November.

However, it is going ahead with pull rate limits on the same date. Both changes of policy, which do not affect paid-for individual or team accounts,  had been announced in August, with the data deletion now delayed a year until 1 November 2021.

The company said that it is currently hosting some 15 petabytes of containers, around 10PB of which hadn’t been touched for over six months, which Docker considered inactive. Of those, 4.5PB are associated with free accounts.

It is this latter class which will be automatically deleted, albeit starting a year later than advertised.

Jean-Laurent de Morlhon, Docker’s VP of software engineering, said in a blog post that the stay of execution was due to users saying they hadn’t had enough notice to re-engineer the way they used the service, and that the company was introducing new tools and an API to ease container management.

The pull rate restrictions were being introduced because of excessive use by a small number of accounts, de Morihon said in the initial announcement of the changes, with anonymous free users now being limited to 100 pulls every six hours and authenticated free users getting 200. Roughly 30 per cent of all downloads on Hub come from only 1 per cent of anonymous users, he said. 

The changes are part of an ongoing process of moving to more usage-based subscription models, the company said.