List of differences between standard and cloud systems

The goal of this page is to list the differences, and organize which and how to resolve them. Here, standard refers to Debian systems installed with DebianInstaller with the default settings, following the instructions in https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/installmanual.

Distribution Binary images

Debian CD (standard image)

KVM

AWS

Azure

GCP

Openstack

Oracle

Tool for generating images

DebianInstaller

fai

fai

fai

fai

openstack-debian-images and FAI

bootstrap-vz

Archive components available by default

main

main

main

main

main

main

main

Images available for Debian releases (suites)

stable

stable

stable

stable1

stable, testing

stable, testing

stable

Kernel

default

cloud

cloud

cloud

cloud

both (2 flavors)

custom

Installed packages (default image)

packages with priority important (debootstrap and higher (plus user choice if any [tasksel])

cloud-init

cloud-init,
awscli

waagent

google-compute-engine

unknown

unknown

Packages installed from outside of Debian archive

none

none

none

none

see2

none

unknown

Default system account

none

debian3

admin

debian

none4

debian

opc

Images description schema

debian-<release version>-<architecture>-<CD number|desktop configuration>.iso

debian-<release version>-genericcloud-<architecture>.[iso|qcow2|raw|tar.xz]

379101102735 5/debian-<codename>-<architecture>-<YYYYMMDD>

unkown

debian-<release version>-<codename>-v<YYYYMMDD>

debian-<release version>-<YYYYMMDD>-openstack-<arch>.qcow2

unknown


CategoryVirtualization | CategorySystemAdministration

  1. Discussions are under way (independently for DebianInstaller and cloud images) to list stable backports by default (installation of backport packages will still be manual, but updates become automatic) (1)

  2. Cloud/GoogleComputeEngineImage (2)

  3. /etc/cloud/cloud.cfg from cloud-init has default_user: {name: debian, lock_passwd: True} so you must use cloud-init to set up a user (3)

  4. https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/compute-image-packages (4)

  5. AMI owner AWS account ID see on Cloud/AmazonEC2Image/Marketplace (5)