Capture, Replicate, Deploy: Image Service Upgrades Now Available

As your application scales, the manual toil of setting up and configuring a compute instance should evolve from a task to an automated pipeline. Images are a cornerstone to that pipeline, making it easy to capture and deploy the latest version of your golden image across multiple instances. We’ve made some recent improvements to our existing image service to significantly improve performance and make it easy to manage replicas of one image across multiple regions. Now, you get full visibility into where your images are deployed, and the costs they incur.

Backed by Akamai CDN for Rapid Deployment

Images now leverage the Akamai CDN to accelerate both image creation and deployment time to create new compute instances. Our CDN’s extensive global presence ensures that your images are cached closer to where they’re needed, resulting in faster compute deployments and more responsive scaling operations during peak demand periods. Compute instances can be globally deployed in minutes regardless of your preferred image location. Our internal benchmarking shows that average image creation (or freeze) is now 18% faster, and image deployment to new compute instances is up to 40% faster than before.

Capture your disk once, then replicate everywhere you need a saved copy in a single workflow. Choose where to keep replicas, depending on:

• Local availability: Store a replica in each region where your application is deployed to ensure the fastest possible time-to-deploy.
• Global availability: Store a replica in every available region for global coverage.
• Centralized availability: Store limited replicas in “center of gravity” regions.

Manage replicas for each image in the UI, API, or CLI. Select regions or ensure global availability by creating replicas in all available core regions.

The updated image service now includes standard encryption to protect your images, ensuring privacy and security throughout the storage and deployment process.