Plan a Container Registry to Artifact Registry move: copy time, dual-running cost and the change in monthly storage bill.
The migration itself is a bulk copy whose duration is governed by aggregate throughput, but the cost story is the per-GB difference: Artifact Registry lists higher than the Cloud Storage bucket rate Container Registry used, so the bill only stays flat if you prune. Overlap is the hidden line — every day both registries are live, you pay for both. Container Registry is deprecated, so this migration is not optional, and the two things that go wrong are an unbounded overlap period and copying images nobody deploys. Confirm both per-GB rates for your region in the Google Cloud pricing calculator before you commit to a number.
Container Registry Migration
copied GB = stored GB × (1 − pruned share); copy hours = the larger of copied GB × 8,000 Mb ÷ (per-worker Mbps × workers) ÷ 3,600 and images × per-image overhead ÷ workers ÷ 3,600; dual-run cost = (old + new monthly) × overlap days ÷ 30.44.
copied GB = stored GB × (1 − pruned share); copy hours = the larger of copied GB × 8,000 Mb ÷ (per-worker Mbps × workers) ÷ 3,600 and images × per-image overhead ÷ workers ÷ 3,600; dual-run cost = (old + new monthly) × overlap days ÷ 30.44. The migration itself is a bulk copy whose duration is governed by aggregate throughput, but the cost story is the per-GB difference: Artifact Registry lists higher than the Cloud Storage bucket rate Container Registry used, so the bill only stays flat if you prune. Overlap is the hidden line — every day both registries are live, you pay for both.
Container Registry is deprecated, so this migration is not optional, and the two things that go wrong are an unbounded overlap period and copying images nobody deploys. Confirm both per-GB rates for your region in the Google Cloud pricing calculator before you commit to a number.
This calculator takes 11 inputs: Data in Container Registry, Images to copy, Container Registry storage price per GB, Artifact Registry storage price per GB, Copy throughput per worker, Parallel copy workers, Per-image manifest overhead, Days both registries stay live, Old images pruned instead of copied, Manifests and pipelines referencing the old host, Effort to update one reference. The pre-filled defaults are a realistic starting point — replace them with figures from your own environment for a result you can act on.
Artifact Registry can serve gcr.io hostnames from a redirected domain, which buys time by keeping old references working. It is a bridge rather than a destination — the effort estimate here is what it costs to finish the job properly.