Hi!
My team uses the Quay version of qiime2. We were thinking of updating. When I checked the recent instructions for installing with Docker, I saw that it now uses a different image Quay
What's the difference between the two? Are they interchangeable?
Do Docker image tags like 2023.5, 2023.7, 2023.9, etc., remain static or are they subject to updates? This query stems from observations on Docker Hub where tags may not signify immutable images; for instance, Ubuntu 22.04 has seen updates over the past two months despite its tag.
Hello Maria,
Welcome to the forums! 
2023.9 is older (September 2023) while 2024.2 is newer (February 2024).
They are not identical.
It looks like the docs have been updated, but the new build is not yet on https://quay.io
(Our principal deployment engineer is out right now, so we will have to be patient.)
This is a great question because a team can do it either way and I'm not sure if the Qiime team has a policy about this. I know we do patches but I'm not sure if that is yyyy.mm.1 or just in yyyy.mm
Thank you for keeping separate questions in separate threads! I've merged them in this specific case because they are both about docker and version numbers.
Hi Colin!
I appreciate your swift response! I hope you're having a great day.
2023.9 is older (September 2023) while 2024.2 is newer (February 2024).
They are not identical.
I don't think I was clear on my first question. Apologies about that.
I was wondering more about the difference of 'qiime2/core' and 'qiime2/amplicon' images since we're currently using the 2023.5 image of 'core' but now the docs say to use the 'amplicon' image
This is a great question because a team can do it either way and I'm not sure if the Qiime team has a policy about this. I know we do patches but I'm not sure if that is
yyyy.mm.1or just in yyyy.mm
I just now checked the tag history of some tags on qiime2/core. It seems that the patches are yyyy.mm and are not updated after they're created.
The distributions (amplicon, shotgun, tiny) were introduced in 2023.9.
Before that, there was just one Core distribution:
https://docs.qiime2.org/2023.7/install/
If you were working with 16S data, you previously would use Core and now use Amplicon.
If you were working with shotgun data, you would previously use Core and now use Shotgun, etc.
I hope this is at least a little helpful. I know I'm not the expert here!
Let's wait to hear from Liz because she can answer all these versioning questions and also push updates to that Docker channel.
Hi @Maria_Sofia_Yangzon (and @colinbrislawn)!
Thanks for your patience! Happy to provide some clarification here.
@colinbrislawn is exactly correct regarding the updates to our distributions (i.e. core -> amplicon/shotgun/etc). If your team was previously using the core image, this will be roughly equivalent to using our amplicon image and is what I'd recommend updating to.
In terms of our tag history - while we do patch versions of our QIIME 2 releases (20XX.REL.1 etc), we'll typically just replace the Docker image of that particular release with the patched version.
Hopefully this helps! Please let me know if you have any additional questions or need any further clarification. Cheers 
Thank you so much for this, Liz! This is exactly what I needed
Thank you for the assistance as well Colin!
