Markdown Content - The Image Mode Journey: From Your Laptop to Production

---
# The Image Mode Journey: From Your Laptop to Production

**URL:** https://crunchtools.com/image-mode-journey-laptop-to-production/
Date: 2026-03-12
Author: fatherlinux
Post Type: post
Summary: I’ve been running RHEL 10 image mode on my laptop since a few days before Red Hat Summit in May 2025, and I recently deployed it on a Linode VPS on March 4th. The whole experience has taught me something about how people actually adopt this technology, because I think the journey looks a lotContinue Reading "The Image Mode Journey: From Your Laptop to Production" →
Categories: Articles
Tags: Best Practices, Container Images, Linux, RHEL, Systems Administration
Featured Image: https://crunchtools.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/image-mode-journey-laptop-to-production-thumbnail.png
---

I've been running RHEL 10 image mode on my laptop since a few days before Red Hat Summit in May 2025, and I recently deployed it on a Linode VPS on March 4th. The whole experience has taught me something about how people actually adopt this technology, because I think the journey looks a lot more like what I did than what anyone draws on a whiteboard. For most people, I think it's a lot like stacking bricks, where you have to get your hands dirty and get one layer solid before you can really think about what the next one is going to be, and you sort of build up your confidence as you go. Looking back, I see three stages in that progression, and I think understanding them helps you know what to expect and where to focus your energy.

## Stage 1: A VM on Your Laptop

Every builder I know starts the same way. They hear about a technology, they spin up a VM, and they poke at it until they get the warm fuzzy feeling that it works. That's what I did with image mode, and I think that's what most people will do too.

Getting image mode installed through Anaconda right now takes some patience. I had to work through a few things that weren't obvious, and knowing the engineering team well enough to ask questions definitely helped me move faster. The installation process works, but it requires more prior knowledge about how bootc and image mode fit together than I think it should at this point. That's something I expect will get smoother over time.

I've got to admit, I was pretty skeptical of the whole immutable filesystem at first, because it feels like it gets in your way. But after running it on my daily driver for close to a year now without having some random update bork my system, I started to really get why the engineers built it this way. Podman is right there waiting for you, you can start running containers immediately, and I think a lot of builders would have that same reaction once they get past the initial setup, which is why smoothing out that first experience matters so much.

## Stage 2: A VPS You Can Leave Running

Once you're comfortable on your local VM, you want to put it somewhere more permanent. In my experience, that doesn't mean AWS or Azure. Most builders aren't going to spin up instances on a major cloud provider for personal projects, because it's too expensive. What they actually do is go to a VPS provider like Linode or Digital Ocean, where they can get a box running for five or ten dollars a month and not worry about it.

I went through this exact process with my Linode server. I used Claude to help me figure it out, and even Claude needed some guidance, trying various approaches before I pointed it toward BIB, the bootc image builder, to convert the container image into a raw disk image that Linode could boot. After that hint, the rest came together in about thirty minutes. The knowledge is out there, it just needs to be better documented and easier to discover.

You also hit a point where you get tired of building images locally and pushing them by hand, so you set up GitHub Actions to do it automatically. I wrote about this whole process in my [CI/CD for Image Mode RHEL](https://crunchtools.com/ci-cd-for-image-mode-rhel/) post. You push your images to a private container registry and updates happen automatically. Once this pipeline is running, it doesn't get in your way, which is really all you want.

This is where I live right now. I'm a product manager, not a sysadmin who's responsible for running things in production at scale. I don't have the authority or the need to deploy workloads in AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud. My Linode VPS is where my personal infrastructure lives, and I think that's true for a lot of builders. We in the enterprise world get so focused on these massive cloud deployments that we forget there's a huge number of people out there who just need a couple of cheap servers that work, and for them, getting a VPS running isn't just a step on the journey, it's the whole point.

## Stage 3: Bringing It to Work

I haven't personally gone through this stage, so I want to be upfront about that. What I'm describing here comes from watching what happens when builders take what they learned on their own and bring it into an enterprise environment.

The pipeline from Stage 2 mostly carries over, which is encouraging. GitHub Actions, a private registry, BIB, the same basic workflow. The major cloud providers actually have better support for custom images than the tier-two VPS providers, so in some ways this step is easier from an infrastructure perspective. But now you have to go convince a security team that's been doing things one way for ten years that they need to think about endpoint security differently, and I think that conversation is probably harder than any of the technical work you did in the first two stages.

Security agents like CrowdStrike are the big one. The immutable filesystem that makes image mode so appealing means third-party agents need to be either baked into the bootc image itself or run as privileged containers. The customers I've talked to who've gotten through this part tend to agree that both approaches are actually a better model than traditional agent installation, but it does require buy-in from the security team and a willingness to rethink how they've always done it.

## What I've Learned

So it really is a whole progression, I think, from just spinning up a VM on your laptop to see what works, to getting it running on a cheap VPS where you can let it sit for a while, and only then do you have the confidence and the experience to start fighting the bigger battles of trying to get it running at work. Each stage taught me something that I needed to know before I could move to the next one, and I don't think you can skip steps.

---

## Categories

- Articles

---

## Navigation

- [Home](https://crunchtools.com/)
- [Articles](https://crunchtools.com/category/articles/)
- [Events](https://crunchtools.com/category/events/)
- [News](https://crunchtools.com/category/news/)
- [Presentations](https://crunchtools.com/category/presentations/)
- [Software](https://crunchtools.com/software/)
- [Beaver Backup](https://crunchtools.com/software/beaver-backup/)
- [Check BGP Neighbors](https://crunchtools.com/software/check-bgp-neighbors-nagios/)
- [Chev](https://crunchtools.com/software/chev-check-vulnerabilities-script/)
- [Graph BGP Neighbors](https://crunchtools.com/software/grpah-bgp-neighbors/)
- [Graph MySQL Stats](https://crunchtools.com/software/graph-mysql-stats/)
- [Graph Sockets Pipes Files](https://crunchtools.com/software/graph-sockets-pipes-files/)
- [MCP Servers](https://crunchtools.com/software/mcp-servers/)
- [Petit](https://crunchtools.com/software/petit/)
- [Racecar](https://crunchtools.com/software/racecar/)
- [Shiva](https://crunchtools.com/software/shiva/)
- [About](https://crunchtools.com/about/)
- [Home](https://crunchtools.com)

## Tags

- Best Practices
- Container Images
- Linux
- RHEL
- Systems Administration