Creating custom images from servers¶

The first time that you boot a cloud server, you’ll probably use an image supplied by Rackspace. We supply images of many different operating systems, all configured to run optimally in the Rackspace cloud.

Because the images supplied by Rackspace need to appeal to a wide range of customers with varying use cases, you might find that you have to manually install some of the packages that your applications require, and you might have unique configuration needs. For example, you might prefer to run httpd on port 8080 instead of its default port 80. If you have only one server, such customization might not be an issue, but if you’re using the cloud, you might find that you need to scale horizontally by creating more servers of the same kind.

There are two general approaches that you can take for this task: bootstrapping and baking.

Bootstrapping: Whenever you need a new server, use a Rackspace base image to boot your server and then use a configuration management tool such as Chef or Puppet to install the extra packages and make the appropriate configuration changes.
Baking: Use a Rackspace base image to boot your first server. Then install your packages on the server, make the appropriate configuration changes. When the server is set up properly, create an image of the server. Then when you need to scale horizontally, you can use the image to boot the new servers, which will contain all of your customizations.

Each approach has advantages and disadvantages. Which one you pick depends on your application and workflow needs.

With bootstrapping, your cloud server is likely to boot quickly. Because so many users utilize the Rackspace base images, they tend to be cached close to most hypervisors and download quickly. After the server initializes, you must run your configuration management tool to install the software and modify the server before it is ready for your application.
With baking, as soon as your cloud server initializes, everything is installed and configured, so your application should be ready to use. Because you’re using your own private virtual machine image, however, it’s unlikely that the image is cached anywhere, and it might take longer to download your image from Cloud Images to the host machine where your server will be built.

It’s also possible to combine the two approaches. Many people use bootstrapping to prepare and test a server, and then they bake an image of that server to use for deployments. One advantage to the combined approach is that you can benefit from updates Rackspace makes to its base images. For example, when a base image is updated to address a security vulnerability, you can use your bootstrapping tools to prepare an updated image of your particular application server.