Overview

We currently provide several curated images for use with the STFC Cloud.

These are images which have been preconfigured to meet our Terms Of Service by having automatic updates enabled and reporting in to various monitoring systems.

We currently provide 2 operating systems, Rocky Linux/Scientific Linux (a RedHat derivative) and Ubuntu.

We aim to produce new versions of each image at least monthly with the previous version being renamed and deactivated.

Provided Images

We provide 3 different variants of images:

• Gui - Includes a preinstalled desktop environment

• NoGui - A minimal install

• AQ - A minimal install bootstrapped into the Aquilon configuration management system (Only available to Aquilon users within STFC)

Additional Operating systems

We currently only offer the above operating systems as there is an overhead to providing the curated images although we are currently working on the provision of Ubuntu 22.04 and Rocky 9 images.

We do allow users to upload their own images although it is then the users’ responsibility to ensure any VMs created with these comply with our Terms Of Service. Any non compliant VMs will be deleted.

Please contact us at cloud-support@stfc.ac.uk if you would like to upload your own images and discuss how to comply with the Terms Of Service.

Kubernetes images

Upon request STFC Cloud also provides CAPI images for kubernetes clusters. The image we for the kubernetes nodes is from a fork of Ubuntu's upstream CAPI image (image is customised to meet UKRI policy).

Currently our images for CAPI have the prefix capi-ubuntu-2004-kube-<k8s_vesion>-<build_date>The ones currently available are:

• capi-ubuntu-2004-kube-v1.26.10-2023-11-01

• capi-ubuntu-2004-kube-v1.27.7-2023-11-01

The image is specifically for nodes within a CAPI cluster, management VMs use the usual Ubuntu 20.04 image. For more information on CAPI and kubernetes, see Cluster API Setup.

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