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Elastic Compute Service:Community images

Last Updated:Aug 16, 2023

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

Overview

You must sign the Product Terms, Terms of Use, and Membership Agreement before you can use a community image. Community images are only available in the US (Virginia) and US (Silicon Valley) regions. If you want to use a community image in other regions, submit a ticket.

The management of a community image involves the following parties.社区镜像

  • 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.

Usage notes

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

  • You can use published community images to create Elastic Compute Service (ECS) instances. However, only verified enterprise users have permissions to publish community images.

  • Encrypted images cannot be published as community images.

  • Before you publish a community image, you must sign the Product Terms, Terms of Use, and Membership Agreement.

  • Community images are publicly available. A community image is available to all Alibaba Cloud accounts in the region where it resides.

  • Community images cannot be shared, exported, or copied.

Requirements

When you publish a community image, you must specify a name and a description that comply with the following rules for the image. If you do not meet these requirements for publishing community images for an extended period of time, your permissions to publish community images are revoked.

  • The image name must indicate 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.

  • The image description must specify the purpose of the image, such as providing services or installing software. Example: Zend Server Enterprise with PHP 7.0 on RHEL7.

  • The image name and description cannot contain sensitive words, and the image must be free of illicit content, such as trojans, viruses, vulnerabilities, and weak passwords.

  • 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

  1. 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.

  2. On the Custom Images tab, find the image that you want to publish as a community image and choose image.png > Publish as Community Image in the Actions column.

  3. In the Publish as Community Image message, complete the publishment.

    • If you do not sign the Community Image Terms of Service, select the I am aware of risks and agree to the following agreements check box and then click Confirm.

      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 Community Image Terms of Service, 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 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.

  1. 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.

  2. On the Custom Images tab, find the custom image that has been published as a community image and choose image.png > Unpublish Community Image in the Actions column.

  3. 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.