Chapter 12: Creating Immutable Infrastructure Using Packer

Managing compute infrastructure, even in the era of the cloud, is still a challenge. With the innovations in containerization, virtual machines (VMs), and serverless computing, developers might believe that compute infrastructure is a solved problem.

Nothing could be farther from the truth. For cloud providers or others running their own data centers, bare metal machines (the machine's OS not running in virtualization) must be managed. This has become more complicated in the era of cloud computing. Not only does your provider need to manage their OS rollouts and patches, but so do cloud customers who want to run fleets of VMs and containers. Container orchestration systems such as Kubernetes must still provide container images that contain an OS image.

In the cloud, just like a physical data center, it is important to force OS compliance for all containers and VMs. Allowing anyone to run whatever OS they want is...