Microsoft’s GitHub has announced the launch of a public beta of its Container Registry. The service is designed to improve how containers are handled within GitHub Packages for package management.

Launched last year, GitHub Packages helps teams with greater traceability of their software supply chain. New capabilities introduced as part of GitHub Container Registry improve the experience and performance it provides for developers.

In other words, developers can better enforce access policies, encourage usage of a standard base image, and promote innersourcing through easier sharing across the organization.

GitHub Container Registry also offers anonymous access for public container images. The team has got things started by publishing a public image of its own super-linter.

The container registry is free for public images.

The company has also introduced data sharing and fine-grained permissions for containers across the organization. By publishing container images with the organization, teams can more easily and securely share them with other developers on the team.

Going forward, GitHub plans to continue to provide updates on the Container Registry through the GitHub public roadmap.

“We’ll be sharing information there shortly about our plans to support more open standards for cloud-native development, including Helm 3 charts for Kubernetes applications and using Container Registry for universal storage,” Kayla Ngan, product manager at GitHub, said in a blog post.