US Patent 12093673 Smart image registries for dynamic image generation

Systems and methods for generating container images are described. An image definition file specifying a set of packages is received at a virtual image server. The image definition file may specify a set of packages and the virtual image server comprises a mapping of the image definition file to an image file corresponding to each of the set of packages. For each of the set of packages, the corresponding image file may be retrieved from an image registry and used to generate, by the virtual image server, an image manifest that references the corresponding image file for each of the set of packages as a separate image layer. The image manifest is provided to a container host, which may build a container image based on the image manifest.