At our company we set up an OpenStack Cloud and are currently creating internal guidelines for creation of OS templates / images. One controversial topic was if we should provide swap inside the VM templates. Therefore I'd like to ask the following questions From an elastic Cloud provider point of view, does it make sense to offer swap partitions / files in the VM templates or is swap not needed when a VM can be resized? Which scenarios necessarily demand a swap file to be present? What kind of Storage should be used for swap files (e.g. local / central, FC / iSCSI / NFS)? Are there any best practices for offering swap files in a performant way in Cloud Infrastructures?