Creating an image from an ISO file
If you have been an MSDN, TechNet, or Action Pack subscriber in the past, you probably remember the binders full of discs that Microsoft used to ship.
Today, shipping software on DVD is mostly a thing of the past. And yet, one thing that keeps reminding us of this past is that many software packages are made available for download as ISO file.
In a cloud environment, ISO files can be tedious to work with. Unlike desktop hypervisors, cloud providers usually do not support mounting an ISO file as a virtual DVD drive. To access the contents of an ISO file, you first have to download the file to the VM so that you can then mount it. The bigger the ISO file and the larger the number of VMs that need access to contents of the I SO file, the more inefficient and cumbersome this process becomes.
Often, a better way to deal with ISO images is to turn them into an image. To see how that works, check out my new article Creating an image from an ISO file in the Google Cloud product docs.