Images service¶

Service description¶

Images service is a core service of the Rumble Cloud Platform that helps you discover, register, and retrieve virtual machine images. It provides a repository to upload, share, and manage images files that are used to create and boot virtual machine instances.

Image service uses OpenStack Glance in conjunction with other services, including cloud-init.

Features¶

Image storage, to store virtual machine images in QCOW2 format
Image discovery, to search for and discover virtual machine images
Image registration, to register new virtual machine images
Image retrieval, to create new virtual machine instances from the image repository
Image sharing, to collaborate with users across projects
Security, for securing image data
Integration, for a unified and end-to-end coordination of cloud services

Key concepts¶

How it works¶

Rumble Cloud provides tools to manage images.

You can register images with Image service by providing metadata about the image, such as its name, format, and size. This metadata is used to manage and retrieve images.
Image service allows images to be distributed across multiple locations, enabling efficient access and deployment of instances in different geographic regions or data centers.
You can create, list, update, and delete images.
When creating a virtual machine instance, you specify an image to use as the template for the instance's operating system and initial configuration. Compute service retrieves the image from Image service and uses it to boot the instance.
Compute service allows you to create snapshots of running instances, which are stored as images. These snapshots can be used to create new instances with the same state as the original instance at the time of snapshotting.
Image service supports image signing and verification to ensure the integrity and authenticity of images. This helps protect against tampering and unauthorized modifications.

Cloud-init

Image services works best with Linux distribution using cloud-init. Cloud-init is free open-source, industry standard software for provisioning, initializing, and configuring virtual machines. Cloud-init runs when an image boots and helps to configure various defaults and settings, such as setting up the use of SSH keys for images.

You can learn more by reading the cloud-init documentation.