US Patent 9858105 Service for managing custom virtual machine images

A virtual machine image service is disclosed in a compute service environment to support management of virtual machine images. The virtual machine image service uses the customer input to generate a new virtual machine image with customization applied. In a simple example, the customer can provide information regarding which virtual machine image requires software updates. In turn, the service can retrieve the virtual machine image, install the updates, reduce the volume of the virtual machine image, run tests to confirm the virtual machine image runs properly, scan the virtual machine image for viruses, and update any desired configuration tools and device drivers. Using customer control features (e.g., a definition file, a script, and/or API parameters), the customer can control what operations are performed on the virtual machine image.