Proxy Dockerhub access with K3S
The Problem
When you are running a Kubernetes cluster, you will often deploy images from Dockerhub.
This can be slow, as the images have to be downloaded from the internet.
This can be a problem if you have a slow internet connection, or if you have to deploy many images at once.
You also waste bandwidth, as the images are downloaded multiple times.
In addition, you might want to be able to scan the images for security vulnerabilities before deploying them. Or you need to authenticate to download the images, as many images run into rate limiting issues otherwise.
The Solution
One way to solve this problem is to use a proxy.
This proxy can be used to cache images, so that they do not have to be downloaded from Dockerhub every time.
This is also known as a Pull Through Cache1 2, which is a common solution to this problem.
This can speed up the deployment process, as the images are already available on the local network. And prevents being rate limited, as the images are only downloaded from Dockerhub Once. An additional benefit, is that the hosts do not need to have direct access to Dockerhub, and do not need to the credentials, limiting the exposure of the credentials.