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Feature request: Support 3rd party private container registries + authentication like EKS #432

Description

Problem

Substrate's atelet currently only supports GCP Application Default Credentials for authenticating image pulls (--gcp-auth-for-image-pulls). Users running on other cloud providers — EKS (AWS ECR), AKS (Azure ACR), or self-hosted registries — have no way to pull images from private registries.

Current behavior

  • GCP ADC auth is supported via --gcp-auth-for-image-pulls
  • Local/localhost registry rewrites are supported via --localhost-registry-replacement
  • No support for AWS ECR, Azure ACR, GHCR, or generic Docker credential helpers

Proposed solution

Add pluggable registry authentication so operators can configure credentials for any OCI-compatible private registry. At minimum:

  • AWS ECR — IAM Roles for Service Accounts (IRSA) / instance profile token refresh
  • Azure ACR — Workload Identity / managed identity
  • Generic — static imagePullSecrets-style config (username/password or token) for self-hosted registries (Harbor, Artifactory, GHCR, etc.)

This likely maps to adding new flags or a credentials config file to atelet, and wiring additional authenticators into the go-containerregistry keychain used during image pulls (cmd/atelet/main.go).

Why it matters

Many teams run AI agent workloads on EKS or AKS and store their agent images in ECR/ACR. Without this, Substrate is effectively GCP-only for private image use cases.

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