VM images

A VM image is the OS template used to boot a new VM's root disk. NimbusNexus ships public images for the major Linux distros and Windows Server; you can also upload your own custom images built with tools like Packer or by snapshotting a configured VM.

Public images

The public catalog updates monthly with security patches. Slugs are stable across patches; pulling ubuntu-24.04 today and again in 6 months gives you 6 months of patches applied to the same base. Pin to a dated slug (e.g. ubuntu-24.04-20260301) if you need byte-reproducible boots.

Currently published slugs:

• ubuntu-24.04, ubuntu-22.04, ubuntu-20.04
• debian-12, debian-11
• fedora-40, fedora-39
• rocky-9, rocky-8
• almalinux-9, almalinux-8
• windows-2022, windows-2019

Every public image includes our minimal cloud-init configuration: SSH keys injected from the project's registered keys (see SSH keys), apt-get update or equivalent on first boot, and the metadata service pinned to 169.254.169.254.

Custom images

Bring-your-own images are accepted as raw, qcow2, or vmdk files up to 128 GB uncompressed. The image is converted to our internal format on upload (~1–3 minutes per GB) and then becomes a regular bootable image for any VM in the same region.

Custom images are billed at $0.013/GB-month (Object Standard rate) for storage. There's no separate "image storage" tier.

Regions

Public images are available in every live region. Custom images are region-scoped — uploading to us-east-1 doesn't make the image bootable in eu-central-1 without a copy. Use POST /v1/vm-images/{id}/copy (not in the reference below — coming) to replicate.

What's next

• Virtual machines — provision a VM with one of these images.
• VM sizes — the compute shape the image boots into.
• Snapshots — capture an existing VM as a snapshot, then convert to a custom image.