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What is Packer?
Packer is a 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, creating 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 tools like Chef or Puppet to install software onto the image.
A machine image is a single static unit that contains a pre-configured operating system and installed software which is used to quickly create new running machines. Machine image formats change for each platform. Some examples include AMIs for EC2, VMDK/VMX files for VMware, OVF exports for VirtualBox, etc.
Historically, creating these images has been a predominantly manual process. Any existing automated tools were able to create only one type of image. Packer, on the other hand, is able to automatically create any type of image, all from a single source configuration. This unlocks untapped potential in developing, testing, and deploying applications.
Pre-baked machine images have a lot of advantages, but we've been unable to benefit from them because they have been too tedious to create and manage. Packer tears down this barrier, allowing the benefits of pre-baked machine images to become available to everyone. Some benefits include:
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Super fast infrastructure deployment. Packer images allow you to launch completely provisioned and configured machines in seconds, rather than several minutes or hours. This benefits not only production, but development as well, since development virtual machines can also be launched in seconds, without waiting for a typically much longer provisioning time.
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Multi-provider portability. Because Packer creates identical images for multiple platforms, you can run production in AWS, staging/QA in a private cloud like OpenStack, and development in desktop virtualization solutions such as VMware or VirtualBox. Each environment is running an identical machine image, giving ultimate portability.
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Improved stability. Packer installs and configures all the software for a machine at the time the image is built. If there are bugs in these scripts, they'll be caught early, rather than several minutes after a machine is launched.
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Improved testability. After a machine image is built, that machine image can be quickly launched and smoke tested to verify that things appear to be working. If they are, you can be confident that any other machines launched from that image will function properly.
Packer makes it extremely easy to take advantage of all these benefits.
What are you waiting for? Let's get started!