Google Compute Engine: what is the difference between disk snapshot and disk image?

Question

I\'ve been using both for my startup and to me, the functionality is the same. Until now, the instances I\'ve been creating are only for computation. I\'m wondering how GCE dis

Answer 1

Snapshots are primarily targeting backup and disaster recovery scenarios, they are cheaper, easier to create (can often be uploaded without stopping the VM). They are meant for frequent regular upload, and rare downloads.

Images are primarily meant for boot disk creation. They optimized for multiple downloads of the same data over and over. If the same image downloaded many times, subsequent to the first download the following downloads are going to be very fast (even for large images).

Images do not have to be used for boot disks exclusively, they also can be used for data that need to be made quickly available to a large set of VMs (In a scenario where a shared read-only disk doesn't satisfy the requirements for whatever reason)