Harbor Satellite: A proxy for your container registry

Container registries have become a critical dependency in modern software delivery, but they also introduce challenges around latency, bandwidth, availability, and access control, especially in distributed, air-gapped, or multi-cluster environments.

This talk introduces Harbor Satellite, a lightweight OCI registry proxy that sits between your workloads and upstream container registries. Instead of mirroring everything or maintaining multiple registry instances, Harbor Satellite transparently proxies image requests, caches artifacts on demand, and enables organizations to optimize image distribution while maintaining compatibility with standard OCI clients.

We'll explore how Harbor Satellite works under the hood, how it differs from traditional pull-through caches and registry mirrors, and how it leverages the OCI Distribution API specification to serve container images efficiently. Through live demos and real-world deployment scenarios, attendees will learn how to improve image availability, reduce bandwidth consumption, and simplify registry architectures across edge locations, remote clusters, and enterprise environments.

Whether you're running Harbor at scale, operating Kubernetes across multiple regions, or simply looking for a smarter way to distribute OCI artifacts, this session will provide practical guidance for adopting Harbor Satellite in production.

After attending this session, participants will be able to:

• Understand the role of Harbor Satellite and why a registry proxy can be a better fit than full registry replication in many scenarios.

• Learn how OCI-compatible clients interact with Harbor Satellite using the standard OCI Distribution API.

• See how on-demand caching improves image pull performance while reducing network traffic and dependency on upstream registries.

• Walk away with practical guidance and architectural best practices for integrating Harbor Satellite into existing Harbor or any container registry ecosystems.