publish and use community images - Elastic Compute Service

Community images are publicly available. You can publish custom images as community images for other users to obtain and use.

Overview

The management of a community image involves the following parties.

Alibaba Cloud: provides the platform where community images are published and managed by vendors.
Vendor: provides custom images and publishes them as community images.
Image user: uses community images.

Publish a community image

You can publish a custom image that is in the Available state as a community image.

Important

Only verified enterprise customers can submit a ticket to apply for the permissions to publish community images. Before enterprise customers in the US (Virginia) and US (Silicon Valley) regions publish community images, they must sign the Product Terms, Terms of Use, and Membership Agreement.

Considerations

Before you publish a community image, take note of the following items:

Encrypted images cannot be published as community images.
Community images are publicly available. A community image is available to all Alibaba Cloud accounts in the region in which the image resides.
Community images cannot be shared, exported, or copied.

Requirements

Important

When you publish a community image, you must specify a name and a description that comply with the following rules for the image. This facilitates image users to select the community image.

Image name
We recommend that the image name indicates the operating system type, kernel version, architecture, and the time when the community image is published. The image name can also indicate the image version. Example: ubuntu20.04_kernel4.18_x86_64_20230101_v1.0.

Image description

We recommend that you provide a detailed description of the community image to allow image users to explicitly select and use the image. The following table describes the sample content that a description can contain.

Content	Description	Example
Iteration version number	Each iteration must be marked with a version number to distinguish different versions.	Ubuntu 20.04 LTS
Feature changes	Describe the added, modified, and removed features in detail in each iteration. Describe the functionality, purposes, and effects of the new features, and the improvement or modification to the original features.	Added a graphical interface toolkit to allow users to easily perform graphical operations. Updated the package manager to enhance software installation and update capabilities. Optimized network settings to improve the stability and speed of network connections. Added an automated deployment script to simplify the deployment process of images.
Issue fixes	List the bugs or defects that have been fixed, and describe the effects and impacts of the fixes.	Fixed kernel crashes that occurred in specific hardware environments. Resolved the defect that the driver cannot be loaded after the system restarts in specific scenarios.
Performance optimization	Describe the measures and results of performance optimization, such as startup acceleration and resource usage reduction.	Optimized the system startup time and shortened the startup waiting time. Reduced the system resource usage and improved overall performance.
Security enhancement	Describe patches and improvements for potential security risks or vulnerabilities.	Upgraded the kernel version and fixed known security vulnerabilities. Strengthened the authentication and permission management and improved the security of the system.
Dependency update	If dependencies or libraries are updated in an iteration version, explains the content and reasons of the updates.	Updated the list of software sources to include the most recent software package and library versions.
Compatibility	If an iteration version is incompatible with the previous version, specifies and provides corresponding solutions.	Take note that this release supports 64-bit operating systems, but no longer supports 32-bit operating systems.

Security confirmation
Check and make sure that the image name and description do not contain sensitive words, and that the image is free of illicit content, such as trojans, viruses, vulnerabilities, and weak passwords.
Image check
The Publish Community Image operation triggers an image check. For information about the image check feature, see Image check items. After the image check is completed, a system tag that indicates the detected attributes of the image is added to help you identify the image. The detected attributes include the operating system version, architecture, and kernel version. For information about system tags, see Overview.

Procedure

Go to the Images page.
1. Log on to the ECS console.
2. In the left-side navigation pane, choose Instances & Images > Images.
3. In the upper-left corner of the top navigation bar, select a region.
On the Custom Images tab, find the image that you want to publish as a community image and choose > Publish as Community Image in the Actions column.
In the Publish as Community Image message, complete the publishment.
For enterprise customers in the US (Virginia) and US (Silicon Valley) regions to use community images by signing the community image agreements, take note of the following items:
- If you have not signed the community image agreements, select You have signed and agreed to the following agreements and then click Publish.
  Important
  Read the Product Terms, Terms of Use, and Membership Agreement. If you agree to the relevant terms and agreements, sign them.
- If you have signed the agreements, click Confirm.
After the community image is published, you can go to the Images page and click the Community Images tab to view the information about the published community image.

Use a community image to create an ECS instance

You can use a community image to quickly deploy Elastic Compute Service (ECS) instances whose operating systems, applications, and data suit your business requirements. For more information, see Create an ECS instance by using a community image.

Unpublish a community image

When you want to update or stop maintaining a published community image, you can unpublish the image.

Note

After a community image is unpublished, it is not publicly available to other Alibaba Cloud accounts. If the community image has been shared with other Alibaba Cloud accounts before it is unpublished, the share relationship continues.
After a community image is unpublished, the system disks of ECS instances created by using the community image cannot be re-initialized.

Go to the Images page.
1. Log on to the ECS console.
2. In the left-side navigation pane, choose Instances & Images > Images.
3. In the upper-left corner of the top navigation bar, select a region.
On the Custom Images tab, find the custom image that has been published as a community image and choose > Unpublish Community Image in the Actions column.
In the Unpublish Community Image message, confirm the image information and click Confirm.
If the image is unpublished, the message "The *** image is unpublished" appears.

References

Community images are custom images shared by users with the Alibaba Cloud community. If a community image is derived from a paid image, you are charged a license fee when you use the community image to create ECS instances. For more information, see Images.
After you use a community image to create an ECS instance, you can replace the operating system of the ECS instance with a new operating system if the community image cannot meet your business requirements. For more information, see Replace the operating system of an instance.
For information about the image families of community images, see Overview.