Some of your production services are running in Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) in the eu- west-1 region. Your build system runs in the us-west-1 region. You want to push the container images from…

Pushing to gcr.io (multi-regional) might distribute copies, but doesn't guarantee that the image will be pulled from the nearest endpoint for eu-west-1 with maximized bandwidth as effectively as a specific regional endpoint.

Pushing to us.gcr.io would store images in a US region, resulting in cross-continent pulls for GKE clusters in eu-west-1, which increases latency and egress costs, and does not maximize bandwidth efficiency for the European cluster.

To maximize bandwidth and minimize latency for image pulls to GKE clusters in eu-west-1, the images should be stored in a regional GCR endpoint that is geographically closest to the clusters. Using eu.gcr.io ensures the images are stored within a Google Cloud region in Europe, allowing GKE clusters in eu-west-1 to pull them efficiently over Google's high-speed internal network.

Running a private image registry on a Compute Engine instance introduces additional operational overhead for management, scaling, and security compared to using a fully managed service like GCR, and may not provide the same level of optimized network performance.