I find after launching a cloud image built from the official Fedora cloud images, I need to do a lot of package updates after installation.
Are these images ever updated with the latest packages within the current major version, or do they always stay the same until the next major version?
With almost all images, they are built at release time and never updated. It is left to the user to perform updates after the initial installation.
I do not use cloud images so have no first hand experience, but it is that way with all other release spin ISOs I see and have used from the download site.
There are some relatively current updated spins available at Index of /pub/alt/live-respins but I see no cloud images there.
Thanks, I feel this is an area where Fedora can improve, the latest Ubuntu 22.04 cloud image is from 22 August, from an initial release date of 25 April.
Not only does this speed up deployment of new instances, it also reduces the burden on mirrors.
The images available for download from fedoraproject.org remain the same for a release.
We do upload nightly Fedora cloud images to both Azure and AWS, but they aren’t currently immediately promoted to be the default so you have to know where to find them to boot them.
For Azure, I currently manually promote an image to be the default every ~2 weeks. I’d like to get testing on them automated so we can roll out fresh images regularly without much human intervention, but I’m not sure when I’ll get that done.
I use Oracle Cloud which has no native Fedora images, just Alma, Rocky and CentOS, so it is necessary for me to import a cloud image for Fedora and use that. The number of packages I have to pull in straight after first boot runs into the hundreds, and will grow until I shift to version 41 when it releases.
There was brief talk of updating the cloud images more frequently here, but unfortunately it didn’t seem to go anywhere.
We build Cloud images nightly. You can find the nightly composes at Index of /compose/cloud and import a recent image from one.
Thanks for the pointer. Is there a reason why none of these subsequent releases are ever published to the main cloud download page? Wouldn’t it just be as simple as publishing a generic link to a file which is symlinked to the latest snapshot?