Container Registry Image Cleanup Tool

How It Works

Container registries grow silently until the bill is shocking. Every CI

run pushes a new image, and nothing ever deletes the old ones. This skill

finds what's actually running and what can be cleaned up.

What You Get

• Registry inventory: total images, total size, growth rate
• In-use identification: cross-reference with running K8s pods, ECS tasks, and deployment specs when available
• Safe-to-delete list: images not referenced by active workloads or declared deployments, with age
• Rollback preservation: keeps N most recent tags per repository
• Lifecycle policy generation for automated future cleanup
• Estimated cost savings from cleanup

Setup Steps

1. Ensure your Claw has access to your container registry CLI (aws ecr, docker, etc.)
2. Ensure kubectl access to identify running images
3. Run the scan to get the inventory and cleanup plan
4. Review the safe-to-delete list and apply

Tips

• Always keep recent tags for rollback capability (default: last 10 per repo)
• Check ALL clusters before deleting — an image might be unused in prod but running in staging
• Generate ECR Lifecycle Policies to automate cleanup going forward
• Watch for images referenced in deployment YAML that aren't currently running (scale-to-zero, cron jobs)
• Start with the biggest repos — that's where the savings are