OS Images & Custom Images

Every Compute Engine VM boots from an image that contains the operating system, pre-installed software, and configuration. Google Cloud provides a catalogue of public images maintained by Google and third-party vendors, and you can create your own custom images for standardised, repeatable deployments.

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Public Images

Public images are maintained by Google and trusted publishers. They are grouped into image families, where each family has a latest recommended version.

Common Public Image Families

Image Family	Project	Description
debian-12	debian-cloud	Debian 12 (Bookworm)
ubuntu-2404-lts-amd64	ubuntu-os-cloud	Ubuntu 24.04 LTS
rhel-9	rhel-cloud	Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9
rocky-linux-9	rocky-linux-cloud	Rocky Linux 9
sles-15	suse-cloud	SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15
windows-2022	windows-cloud	Windows Server 2022
cos-113-lts	cos-cloud	Container-Optimized OS
sql-std-2022-win-2022	windows-sql-cloud	Windows + SQL Server 2022 Standard

Listing Available Images

# List all public images
gcloud compute images list

# List images in a specific project
gcloud compute images list --project=debian-cloud

# List image families
gcloud compute images list --project=ubuntu-os-cloud --filter="family:ubuntu-2404"

Using Image Families

When you specify an image family (rather than a specific image), Compute Engine automatically uses the latest non-deprecated image in that family:

gcloud compute instances create web-server \
  --zone=europe-west2-a \
  --machine-type=e2-standard-2 \
  --image-family=debian-12 \
  --image-project=debian-cloud

This ensures new VMs always get the latest security patches without changing your scripts or templates.

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Custom Images

Custom images are images you create from an existing disk, snapshot, another image, or an imported file. They let you standardise your VM configuration — pre-install software, apply security hardening, configure monitoring agents — so every new VM starts in a known-good state.

Creating a Custom Image from a Disk

# Stop the source VM to ensure data consistency
gcloud compute instances stop source-vm --zone=europe-west2-a

# Create an image from the VM's boot disk
gcloud compute images create my-app-image-v1 \
  --source-disk=source-vm \
  --source-disk-zone=europe-west2-a \
  --family=my-app \
  --description="My App base image with Nginx, monitoring agent, and security hardening"

Creating a Custom Image from a Snapshot

gcloud compute images create my-app-image-v2 \
  --source-snapshot=my-disk-snapshot \
  --family=my-app

Creating a Custom Image from a File (Import)

You can import images from on-premises environments or other clouds:

gcloud compute images import my-imported-image \
  --source-file=gs://my-bucket/my-image.vmdk \
  --os=ubuntu-2204

Supported formats include VMDK, VHD, RAW, and qcow2.

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Image Families

Image families provide a pointer to the latest version of your custom image. When you create a new image in a family, it automatically becomes the latest: