In a world where Cloud IaaS providers are popping up on every street corner, it becomes increasingly important to prevent vendor lockin. Several efforts are already underway in projects like DeltaCloud to help abstract away the differences in API's and allow consumers to be cloud agnostic.

However, the desire for cloud agnosticism becomes increasingly challenging when we start thinking about managing images. Not only do we have API differences, but also many cloud vendors require differing formats and importation methods, some requiring uploading of pre-built images, others snapshots of running instances.

This talk addresses some of the issues surrounding image management in a federated cloud environment and introduces Aeolus Image Factory; a project that offers image management abstraction for multitude of Cloud vendors. Aeolus Image Factory allows users to define images at a high level and have them built, pushed and registered with all the major cloud vendors.