Announcing the public preview of Azure Image Builder

Today we’re announcing the public preview of Azure Image Builder, a service that makes building Windows and Linux virtual machine (VM) images easy in Azure. It helps you build custom VM images with three main purposes in mind: fulfilling security needs, meeting corporate and regulatory compliance rules, and preconfiguring VMs with apps for faster deployment.

Simply describe a custom image in a configuration template and Azure Image Builder will create the custom image. Combined with the Azure Shared Image Gallery, you now have a complete image management system, with image patching, versioning, regional replication, and role-based access control.

Azure Image Builder supports both Linux (Ubuntu 18.04, Ubuntu 16.04, RHEL 7.6, CentOS 7.6) and Windows (Windows Server 2016, Windows Server 2019) VM image creation.

New features

Thanks to great community feedback, we have come a long way since private preview, including these great new features:

• Full image management lifecycle customizing for both Windows and Linux VM images, bringing along your commands, scripts, OS restarts, and build artifacts.
• DevOps Integrations:

• • Create custom images with one AIB VSTS DevOps task
  • Seamlessly download build artifacts from your Azure Storage into images, using the AIB integrated user assigned identity authentication feature. No need for SAS Tokens!

• Support for your complex time-intensive image customizations, for Azure and Azure Stack.

Update and create a new image

Create an image from a template

To learn more, check out the Azure Image Builder documentation.

Questions or feedback? Please let us know in the comments.

Daniel Sol

Principal Program Manager, Azure Compute

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