Creating images has been at the core of infrastructure automation. I am sure we have all created or at least used virtual machine images. It is one of the major reasons for the rise of the adoption of virtualization: its ease of management.
The cloud also uses images, as one of the underlying technologies is virtualization. Now, for the most important question, "how different is the image created for the cloud from one created for virtualization?" The answer is, "Not much!"
The cloud uses known (sometimes modified/tweaked) versions of the virtualization platforms that we have already worked on. As an example, AWS uses a modified version of Xen. OpenStack can technically work with any hypervisor, but the choice is normally ...
