Packer Has a Free Tool That Builds Identical Machine Images for Any Cloud

#packer #devops #infrastructure #opensource

HashiCorp Packer automates the creation of machine images for AWS, GCP, Azure, Docker, VMware, and more. Build once, deploy everywhere.

What You Get for Free

Multi-cloud images — one template for all platforms
Immutable infrastructure — pre-baked, versioned images
Parallel builds — build for multiple platforms simultaneously
Provisioners — shell, Ansible, Chef, Puppet
Post-processors — compress, upload to cloud registries
HCL2 config — same language as Terraform

Build an AMI

source "amazon-ebs" "ubuntu" {
  ami_name      = "my-app-{{timestamp}}"
  instance_type = "t2.micro"
  region        = "us-east-1"
  source_ami    = "ami-0c55b159cbfafe1f0"
  ssh_username  = "ubuntu"
}

build {
  sources = ["source.amazon-ebs.ubuntu"]
  provisioner "shell" {
    inline = [
      "sudo apt-get update",
      "sudo apt-get install -y nginx",
    ]
  }
}