What is Hashicorp Packer?

Building an images is not easy like that it done everybody every day, In past time they tend to be a manual process that once configured is forgotten about or at best the procedures carried out to build the image are captured in a runbook that gets saved on a share or in a document library cannot be read again until somebody corrupts the gold master image or may be when it becomes too bloated with updates.

Therefore, it is completely useless process and you end up having to start from zero.

What is Hashicorp Packer?

Packer by Hashicorp, It is an open source tool which is used for creating identical machine images for multiple platforms from a single source configuration. Packer is lightweight, easily runs on every mainly used operating system. It creating machine images in parallel.

It does not replace configuration management like Chef or Puppet. Although, when building images, it is able to use tools like Chef or Puppet to install software onto the image.

Hashicorp has 4 builders that allow Packer to install new virtual machines to VMware products. These are:

  • vmware-iso
  • vmware-vmx
  • vsphere-iso
  • vsphere-clone

Advantages of victimisation Packer

Super quick infrastructure readying.

Packer image permit you to launch fully provisioned and designed machines in seconds, instead of many minutes or hours. It advantages each production and development in addition.

Multi-provider portability.

Packer is used for making identical pictures for multiple platforms on same time, you’ll be able to run production in AWS, staging/QA during a non-public cloud like OpenStack, and development in desktop virtualization solutions VMware or VirtualBox.

Improved stability.

Packer installs and configures all the code for a machine at the time the image is made. If there are bugs in these scripts, they’re going to be caught early, instead of many minutes once a machine is launched.

Greater testability.

By building a machine image, that image will be quickly launched and smoke tested to verify that things seem to be operating. If they’re operating then you’ll be able to be assured that the other machines launched from that image can operate properly.

Why would you use Packer as all this can be done with Terraform?

Packer Provides organized machines intead of programmatically building out each server into.

An autoscaling group on AWS will significantly increase the speed that a scale-up the process and it will take in times of congestion. It’s a matter of distinguish different parts of a process.

The image is assumed to contain the stack below what you’re developing, and is assumed to not change as part of your development method, but amendment as security patches, software updates for operating system and middleware are available.

Conclusion

Hopefully this introduction to Packer has shown you the ability of the merchandise. it’s not a troublesome product to use and therefore the flexibility it brings to your CI/CD workflows is well well worth the advantage of the time taken to induce personal with it. the actual fact that you just will build out a fully-configured machine to be utilized in your autoscaling teams rather than expecting your terraform builds to complete a full machine readying and application installation is golden.

If you want to learn Hashicorp Packer Go checkout DevOpsSchool, one of the best institute for Harshicorp packer Course and training.

I hope you find this particular blog helpful and informative.

Thank You!!

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