Object Storage

Anchore Engine uses a PostgreSQL database to store structured data for images, tags, policies, subscriptions and metdata about images, but other types of data in the system are less structured and tend to be larger pieces of data. Because of that, there are benefits to supporting key-value access patterns for things like image manifests, analysis reports, and policy evaluations. For such data, Anchore has an internal object storage interface that, while defaulted to use the same postgres db for storage, can be configured to use external object storage providers to support simpler capacity management and lower costs. The options are:

  • PostgreSQL database (default)
  • Filesystem
  • S3 Object Store
  • Swift Object Store

The configuration for the object store is set in the catalog’s service configuration in the config.yaml.

Changed in 0.4.0 of Anchore Engine

In releases before 0.4.0 of Anchore Engine, the configuration key was archive. As of 0.4.0 that has been changed to object_store but will still support archive for backwards compatibility, though that key is now deprecated. The reason for the change is the new in 0.4.0 analysis archive feature, which uses the configuration key analysis_archive.

The change helps differentiate the analysis archive, which is an object store with specific lifecycle semantics, from the more generic object store configuration.


Last modified November 23, 2020: Initial rough impl adding engine docs directory (9dabbe73)