Building custom AMI using Packer.io

Hashicorp has developed a new tool for customizing the way we build images. Previously we would be using various 3rd party tools with no coherency and type to build machine images like in iso format to keep a healthy backup of machine state.

So how can we do that better?

Packer is one of the tools used in today's cloud industry to bundle and package machine images or what AWS Folks call as AMI — Amazon Machine Image, Google Compute Guys — gccompute image or Azure VM Images. Today we will learn about how to make AMIs and on the next two tutorial, I will give you guys a walkthrough for the Google Cloud and Azure usage of Packer.

So what is AMI and what the heck is Packer?

Packer is an open source tool for creating identical machine images for multiple platforms from a single source configuration

Packer is lightweight, runs on every major operating system, and is highly performant. It can create machine images for multiple platforms in parallel. Packer does not replace configuration management like Chef or Puppet. In fact, when building images, Packer is able to use…