AI
Harbor CLI: Out of Sandbox, 1,030 Downloads
The Harbor CLI started as a CI/CD automation tool and grew through LFX mentorship contributors over two years. Vadim Bauer called out Patrick, Lakshit, and Prasant by name as the mentees who moved the project forward and stayed on as maintainers. The session opened with a live removal of the sandbox annotation from the CLI repository, marking its official graduation. The CLI outputs JSON and YAML for machine consumption and covers roughly 95% of Harbor use cases across Linux and Windows.
Proxy Cache: Rate Limit Controls and Retained Artifacts
Yan Wang walked through four proxy cache fixes shipped in recent releases. A new connection-limit parameter lets Harbor fail early on its own side before hitting upstream rate limits, protecting pipelines from Docker Hub throttling. The default behavior for deleted upstream images flipped from removing cached copies to retaining them, giving teams control over local availability. A pull-time bug caused tag retention to delete entire multi-arch indexes when only a specific platform was pulled. That fix landed in the latest patch release.
Garbage Collection: Eliminating Tag Files from Storage
Harbor has always stored tags in both its database and backend object storage. The database copy is authoritative. The storage copy was redundant but garbage collection still had to traverse and delete it, which meant slow filesystem-layer operations for every artifact removal. The fix rewrites push-by-tag requests to push-by-digest before they reach the distribution layer, so no tag file lands in storage at all. Garbage collection now skips that step entirely. A checkbox lets operators apply the change retroactively to existing artifacts without any API break.
AI Model Distribution: Harbor as an OCI-Compatible Model Registry
Harbor collaborated with Alibaba on a CNCF sandbox project called Model Pack to standardize AI model artifacts using OCI packaging. The demo showed cloning a Hugging Face repository locally, generating a module file with the Model CLI, then pushing the resulting OCI layers and manifest into Harbor. The Harbor UI displays a dedicated icon for AI artifacts and surfaces labels, license text, and file listings that match the Hugging Face metadata. Once stored, the artifact inherits Harbor’s access control, replication, and versioning features.
Harbor Satellite: Edge Replication Toward Air-Gap Support
Harbor Satellite actively replicates images to edge locations rather than proxying on demand. Two additions shipped recently: SPIFFE/SPIRE integration for workload identity and an optional proxy mode for teams not yet ready to enumerate every image on each edge node. Air-gap support is in concept phase. The stated requirement is that the same tools and processes work whether the edge has an outbound connection or not, across all air-gap variants a single deployment might encounter.
CNCF Adoption Data and Community Signal
A CNCF survey from December asked users of all graduated projects about production adoption. Harbor landed in the middle of the chart with more than 30% of respondents running it in production and another 5% actively evaluating it. Yan Wang closed by quoting a community member who said the project is worth maintaining because so many users love it. That feedback, alongside the CLI download count and the model distribution work, framed Harbor’s position as a default registry choice across the CNCF ecosystem.
Notable Quotes
the CLI it was mainly created with um uh mentees from the LFX mentorship program. Vadim Bauer · ▶ 03:27
nowadays CLIs are uh popular again right for agentic workloads so you can hook this into aentic workloads and get information about your images in your registry Vadim Bauer · ▶ 01:58
the tag deletion in the storage layer is the file system layer operation. It takes time. Yan Wang · ▶ 16:02
harbor is becoming a def facto registry within the s uh community Yan Wang · ▶ 26:29
Key Takeaways
- Harbor CLI graduated from sandbox with 1,030 downloads and LFX-trained maintainers staying on long-term.
- Garbage collection gets faster by rewriting push-by-tag to push-by-digest, eliminating tag files from storage entirely.
- AI models from Hugging Face can now be packaged as OCI artifacts and managed inside Harbor with full access control and replication.
About the Speaker(s)
Vadim Bauer is a Container Silverback with over a decade of experience running containers in production. As a Harbor maintainer at 8gears, he focuses on OCI artifact management, adoption, and developer experience.