Who uses Packer?

Packer is a purely open source tool for HashiCorp but that doesn’t mean that enterprise customers don’t use it. Packer is used to build images in private networks and public clouds around the world, covering many industries from investment banking to universities and students. Individuals and small teams often use Packer to maintain a set of disposable system images for mixed estates, including Mac, Windows, Linux, and serverless cloud applications. Large teams and organizations may use automation or continuous deployment pipelines for Packer to rebuild a set of images when certain events or edits occur. The beauty of Packer is it behaves the same whether it is running in a multi-cloud Fortune 500 firm or running on a laptop in a coffee shop. You can even run Packer on a low-power commodity ARM device such as Raspberry Pi. The difference between a coffee shop laptop and an enterprise deployment really comes down to security and best practices, which we’ll cover in Chapters 6-8.

The open source community has a great variety of sample templates, so you usually don’t need to start one from scratch. Search the Packer documentation page for samples, as well as GitHub. Unlike Vagrant, which has a public registry of source images, Packer requires the user to provide base images.

Terraform users find Packer valuable for any projects that use VM deployments in a hybrid cloud environment. Properly prepared images will dramatically ease VM provisioning with Terraform. More importantly, cloud-native tooling that may provision instances dynamically, such as autoscale groups or failover routines, will not inform Terraform about their activity. Having a proper VM autoscale group deployed with Terraform still requires a standard image for the cloud to scale.