Make baking easy with Packer

Tamas Michelberger

Secret Sauce Partners, Inc.

@tmichelberger

Agenda

1. What is a machine image?
2. Why should you care? 
3. Baking vs frying
4. Packer basics
5. Let's build an image together

(Virtual) Machine Image

• Snapshot of a pre-configured virtual machine
• A blueprint to launch identical VMs

Benefits

• Faster boot times
• Reproducible builds 
• A big step toward immutable
  infrastructure

Baking vs Frying

Reference: http://if.andonlyif.net/blog/2012/10/baked-servers-vs-fried-servers.html

Building an image

1. Take an existing VM image
2. Launch a new instance from that image
3. Make your changes
4. Save your VM as a new image
5. Rinse and repeat

Packer is a tool for creating machine and container images for multiple platforms from a single source configuration.

Thanks!

Questions?

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