Read Time: 8 Minutes The Bandwidth Trap: Why Docker Registry Fails at Modern Artifact Distribution In the cloud-native era, container registries are often treated as dumb storage buckets. We assume that if an image layer exists on disk, the registry will serve it efficiently. This assumption is dangerously outdated. For years, the industry standard has been the Docker Distribution project ( distribution/distribution ). It works. But "working" is not the same as "optimized." As workloads shift toward edge computing, just-in-time scaling, and strict egress budgets, the architectural debt of the legacy Docker Registry becomes a tangible cost center. This post dissects why Zot Registry , an OCI-native distribution engine, outperforms Docker Registry in two critical areas: mirror (pull-through caching) and on-demand serving . We’ll move beyond feature lists and examine the first-principles of bandwidth economics, concurrency safety, and storage integrity. The Core Thesis: Storage Proxy vs.…