Prefixed by saying this is indeed a good approach, I did just want to point out some potential issues: - Clouds don't universally support qcow2 (or even worse,

Prefixed by saying this is indeed a good approach, I did just want to point out some potential issues: - Clouds don't universally support qcow2 (or even worse, use their own implementation which isn't feature-complete) - Probably a per-cluster compressed qcow2 isn't ever going to be as small as a qcow2.xz file. [Edit: deleted a bogus third point here about making these files, no special tools are needed to create or modify compressed qcow2 files]