Today, we’re releasing significant improvements to our Images capabilities (available in beta) for all customers and data centers. While we’ve long supported developers in taking Image snapshots to easily provision services on Linodes, you can now upload your own image via the Cloud Manager, API, or CLI, and take advantage of expanded storage capacity per account.
The updated Images service significantly reduces the overhead of provisioning Linodes, and allows our customers to use Images to their full advantage. Images are stored even if you don’t have any active Linodes, so the image is always available when you need it and can be deployed to any Linode in any data center.
Images will remain a free service through the beta period, and will transition to a paid service of $0.10/GB per month starting September 1, 2021. All Images users will be notified of the change via Linode Support in advance, giving you the opportunity to remove Images if needed.
Automatic Images, which are short-lived recovery images generated after a Linode is deleted, will remain free.
Linode Image currently supports uploads of raw disk image (.img) files that have been compressed using gzip (.gz) before uploading. The maximum compressed file size for uploading an image is 5 GB. When billing for Images goes into effect, you will be charged for the uncompressed size of the image.
Participating in the Images Beta
Any Linode user is welcome to try the new Images features. Read the updated Linode Images guide for step-by-step instructions, including uploading an image via Cloud Manager.
We plan to continue to improve our Images service, so please send any feedback on features or your experience at https://www.linode.com/feedback/. If you are experiencing a technical issue, please open a support ticket so we can address it as quickly as possible.
Comments (8)
Improvements should be improvements and not breaking working functionality.
I just started a couple nodes with existing images, and the nodes were created and started without expanding the disks to the plan full storage.
So literally they had a root device having 1.7 GB with 0 free space.
Who tested this release?
Sandor Marton: When you deploy a Linode with an Image it does not automatically expand to its fully allotted disk space, but creates a disk that is equal to the size of the Image, therefor you need to perform a disk resize after you deploy. With that said, I’ve included your feedback in an internal discussion about this particular feature of our Images.
I’m pretty sure the dashboard did resize automatically ( or maybe the old one did, since i didn’t use images for the past 4-6- months)
Also there is no point to automatically start the node with an image sized disk, since disk will have zero available space and the OS won’t be able to boot properly.
From my point of view there should be no difference between starting a node from a distribution image, and starting a node from my own image.
I think we should have an option to download the current image if it will no longer be free of charge.
We agree – this is on our radar to do soon, though I don’t have an ETA on when that feature will be available. Until that is ready, you can follow the following guide to download a copy of a Linode: Copy a Disk Over SSH
In this new beta I have a problem with uploading an image via Cloud Manager. Are there any instructions specifically for this process in the documentation?
We updated our documentation to include steps on uploading an Images. If you run into further issues, please open a support ticket with logs, error messages, or details that you encounter while attempting to upload your Image. These details will be helpful for us when we assist with troubleshooting.
This is weird. If you’re going to charge for the service, why the still quite tight limits?
A 6 GB max is definitely a lot better than it was before, but it still may be fairly confining for some uses. I have a base image right now that’s just Fedora + application that comes to 4.5 GB. While my usage case fits well within the limit, if now the data is being paid for, why not bump it until whatever is the internal reasonable maximum?
Also, .gz is an extremely old compression format. If you’re using it because of performance considerations, may I suggest zstd? It decompresses extremely quickly (about the same as gzip according to benchmarks), and achieves a much greater compression ratio.