Images
An image is a complete copy of the file system structure and data on a disk.
It is designed to quickly create a data disk, primarily a VM's boot disk. Images can be used for distributing software, such as OS distributions or disks with pre-installed software.
Tip
To regularly back up your data on disks, use snapshots.
You can create an image from a disk, snapshot, or other image. If you have an image file, you can import it to Yandex Cloud. Follow the instructions to create a disk image with Windows.
When you create a Windows boot disk image, indicate this in the operating system type. This is important for proper CPU emulation and billing.
Image family
If you regularly update your images, you can group them into families. You can use the family name to find the latest image in the family.
Warning
All images belonging to the same family must be in the same folder.
Let's say you want to upload an image of your operating system to Yandex Cloud. When creating an image, specify a family like
best-linux-distro. This lets other users get the latest version of your operating system by specifying the family and image folder ID in the query.
Public images
An example of public images are products and solutions from Yandex Cloud Marketplace.
Learn more about how to get a list of public images.
To make your image available to other Yandex Cloud users, grant them public access to it. To do this, assign the compute.images.user role to the allAuthenticatedUsers system group. However, the compute.images.user role doesn't grant permission to delete or edit your image.
Images optimized for deployment
The feature is at the Preview stage.
An image can be optimized for deploying a large number of VMs. You can create VMs from optimized images much faster than from conventional ones: this enables you to instantly expand your computing power and use tools from your own image on them.
Fast deployment is achieved by using multiple layers for storing data in storage. The first layer stores the image source data, and the second layer stores user data. When creating VM disks from optimized images, the first layer is reused and not copied to a new storage location each time. Disks created from optimized images run on VMs the same way as disks created from standard images: they can be used as boot disks and are fully available for data storage. The performance of these disks does not differ from regular disks.
Standard images from Cloud Marketplace are already optimized for deployment. To optimize your image, select the Optimize for deployment option when uploading the image.
By default, optimized images have a zero quota. To increase the quota, contact support.