Summary

This chapter explored more on builder options than the initial builder featured in our first template. This overview of builders and the plugins that contain them, introduces support for the major cloud providers. We’ve extended our sample template with cloud examples in a bit more depth. We have done everything so far in a single template. We also covered some tips to use HashiCorp Vault to generate short-lived credentials for Packer builds. This is very helpful for high-security environments, where logs will never contain valid credentials used in your cloud environment.

Next, we will go beyond technical validation and delve into design patterns, looking at how to make a hierarchy of base and supplemental images in an optimal structure. We’ll also look further at parallel builds and the use of chroot builders to help speed up specialized image builds without creating a VM instance.