Container Registry in Self Hosted Instance

hi,

we have multiple Gitlab Instances running (EE and CE) in K8S clusters which i installed with the Gitlab Helm Chart. The subchart for the registry has the settings for “database” and “migrations” marked as experimental which should not be used in production.

Afaik gitlab.com is currently migrating the container registry to the database-backed version. What is the recommendation for on-prom installations? When should one use the database-setting? when is it ok to use in production for self-hosted gitlabs? i’m wondering that gitlab.com is migrating but does not recommend this for self-hosted gitlabs.

And do i have to migrate to the database-backed version? Yes, the version with the metadata-DB is surely faster and offers the opportunity for new features (immutable tags, online-GC, …). But at the moment i can install the version without the database. So i ask myself if there will be some point in time when i MUST migrate? The background here is, that a the momemt the whole state is in a S3 bucket and is it really easy to do a backup (s3-mirroring); i simply can install a second registry with a mirrored bucket and have the same data; as long as i do not neet authorisation this can be used for some sort of HA without any dependences.

thanks

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