DEMO/Infrastructure

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Capturing an image from a running instance

Audience: operator · Profile: demo · Read this when: you have a VM configured the way you want and want an image of it.

Part of Image Management.

The "I have a VM I've been hand-tuning, snapshot it as an image" path. Every deploy form has a "Create image" action; the dashboard:

  1. Stops the instance (or doesn't, depending on the cloud's snapshot semantics — AWS allows live snapshot, Azure requires deallocate + generalize).
  2. Calls the cloud's native image-creation API.
  3. Records the resulting image ID against the source-instance job.

Useful for one-offs but not the recommended steady-state path — captured images are harder to reproduce than Packer-built ones, and the build manifest is "whatever was on this VM at this moment", which ages poorly.