What happened?

The CI pipeline currently pulls images from Docker Hub without authentication. As a result, it is subject to Docker Hub's anonymous pull rate limits, which can cause jobs to intermittently fail once the limit is reached.

Observed Behavior

CI jobs fail with errors related to Docker pull rate limits
Failures are intermittent but become more frequent with increased CI activity

Errors typically include messages like:

toomanyrequests: You have reached your pull rate limit.

Steps to Reproduce

Trigger multiple CI runs that pull Docker images
Observe failures once the anonymous pull rate limit is exceeded

Suggested Fix

Add Docker Hub authentication in CI using credentials (e.g., DOCKER_USERNAME and DOCKER_PASSWORD / access token)
Use docker login as part of the CI setup
Alternatively, consider using a mirror or caching strategy to reduce pull frequency

Additional Context
This issue impacts reliability of the CI pipeline and may block contributors due to unrelated test failures.

What did you expect to happen?

CI should authenticate with Docker Hub (or another registry) to avoid anonymous rate limits and ensure stable and reliable pipeline execution.

Environment

• Kubernetes version
• Grove version
• Scheduler details
• Cloud provider or hardware configuration
• Tools that you are using Grove together with
• Anything else that is relevant