Packer Intro. Installing Packer.

[/] Install packer binary

[/] Verify the Installation

[/] Build an Image

--- [/] Create Template

• Used example template from Learn Docs
• named it example.pkr.hcl

--- [/] Verify Template

--- [/] Build First Image with AWS EC2 AMI

• Using the packer build command, my first image with AWS EC2 was born.

--- [/] Learn How to Manage Image

[/] Provision

--- [/] Configure Provisioners

--- [/] Launch AMI

Questions, comments, concerns, etc.

What is a machine image?

A machine image stores all the configuration you want to help create a virtual machine (VM) instance.

Why use machine images?

With machine images, you can take a snapshot of your web application and save it to a unique machine image. You can then use that machine image to launch multiple instances that are configured in the exact same way as your source instance.

What is Packer?

Packer is a Hashicrop IaC tool that makes automating machine image creation easy. Encourages automation of scripts to install and configure software within Packer-made images with unique machine image IDs.

Issues

1. During the "Verify Template" stage, I ran into an issue with the example template from Learn Docs. The issue was with two specific lines. Since the credentials are already set via an .aws/credentials file, these lines have been commented out of the example.pkr.hcl template file. After removing these lines, packer was able to verify the template.

  access_key    = "${var.aws_access_key}"
  secret_key    = "${var.aws_secret_key}"