Stop advertising staging images, use registry.k8s.io or similar

[BenTheElder]

As discussed previously in kubernetes/test-infra#31728 (comment)

A) GCR is deprecated
B) Serving from a single region registry like this is not cost efficient. Originally it was only internal consumption by the project's own CI deployment.

If we want to publish images for external users it should really be at https://registry.k8s.io/ (note: images must go through image promotion, you cannot direct push), for internal usage it could be moved to an AR.

Prow at minimum will have to go through kubernetes/k8s.io#1343 but will be special because other affected projects (at least as far as we know) serve users through registry.k8s.io already so the migration is less pressing ...

Really, we should be promoting images, along with tagging releases, now that we have a repo dedicated to prow.

/kind bug
/priority important-soon

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/lifecycle stale

[BenTheElder]

/lifecycle frozen

[BenTheElder]

cc @petr-muller @krzyzacy @upodroid

Staging registries are not intended for public consumption.
Can we start advertising images on registry.k8s.io instead?

https://github.com/kubernetes/k8s.io/tree/main/registry.k8s.io#managing-kubernetes-container-registries

[krzyzacy]

do we need to do anything to publish images to registry.k8s.io or this is mostly doc updates + move the starter config?

[upodroid]

We need to start releasing prow like we release all other Kubernetes projects. We then promote those images to registry.k8s.io

[krzyzacy]

cc @AishSundar @chemikadze this will be a good starter task if you want to start ramping up somebody ^^

[BenTheElder]

do we need to do anything to publish images to registry.k8s.io or this is mostly doc updates + move the starter config?

I would suggest starting to tag actual versions, but just the date sha is technically enough.

Note that published tags are immutable and you can't yank the published date-sha, which will appear to have really high version numbers versus if you started publishing semver tags.

Otherwise:

• promote the images (https://registry.k8s.io has docs/pointers for this)
• switch docs / configs to point to the promoted images