Ask HN: Differences Between Base Images in Google Cloud, Vagrant Cloud, Do?

3 points

5 years ago

I would like to have the same base image (e.g., Ubuntu 16.04) for dev and prod environments. If I use terraform or vagrant, I see that I can use base images from different cloud providers, but I don't know to which extent these base images are similar/different.

I could find the "source code" for the images provided by Google Cloud (https://github.com/GoogleContainerTools/base-images-docker/tree/master/ubuntu) so I know exactly what comes in the image. I couldn't find similar "sources" for Vagrant Cloud and DO images.

For example, https://app.vagrantup.com/ubuntu/boxes/xenial64 doesn't tell me anything about what's inside the image (in the way Google Cloud does)... it does however point me to http://cloud-images.ubuntu.com/xenial/ (but here I cannot see how the images were built).

In any case, is it fine to use, for example, the "ubuntu/xenial64" base image from Vagrant Cloud for my dev environment, and the equivalent Google Cloud Ubuntu 16.04 image for my prod environment? I will provision them equally, but my concern is that there could be small differences in the base images themselves. Same goes for the DO base image if I need to use DO as cloud provider.