Cascade Regional Airlines wants to distribute its approved maintenance-records VM image to engineering teams in three separate subscriptions and two Azure regions, keep multiple versions available, and control who can use each version. A single managed image resource in one subscription can't do all of this. What should the airline use instead?
Select an answer to reveal the explanation.
Short Explanation
An Azure Compute Gallery is like a shared catalog with version numbers on every item: you publish once, and it can replicate copies to the regions and subscriptions that need them, while keeping older versions around for anyone still on them. A single managed image is more like a single photocopy — it lives in one place and doesn't version itself. When multiple teams and regions need controlled access, the gallery is the tool built for that.
Full Explanation
Azure Compute Gallery (formerly Shared Image Gallery) is purpose-built for distributing VM images at scale: it supports image versioning, replication to multiple regions, and role-based access control so specific subscriptions or users can be granted permission to use a given image definition or version. That directly matches the airline's need to distribute one approved image across three subscriptions and two regions with version control. A manually shared VHD in a public blob container has no versioning, no access control beyond the container's own settings, and exposes the image publicly, which is both unmanageable and a security risk. Manually duplicating a managed image in every subscription and region creates drift the moment one copy is updated and the others aren't, and it scales linearly with effort instead of through a single publish action. A snapshot captures a disk's data, not a deployable VM image definition, and granting contributor access to a snapshot doesn't provide the versioning or multi-region replication the scenario requires. As an operational check, confirm the gallery's replication settings list both target regions and that the intended subscriptions have been granted the appropriate role on the image definition before teams try to deploy from it.