Packer is a tool for creating machine and container images for multiple platforms from a single source configuration. It allows users to automate the creation of machine images by defining infrastructure in configuration files and running builds that put everything needed to reproduce the machine into an image. Packer templates define builders, provisioners, variables and other configuration to automate the creation of images. This simplifies deployment by allowing images to be built once and then easily deployed to different environments like development, testing and production.

1. Let Packer
Simplify your work
— It’s all about DevOps

2. Content
•Why Packer created
•How to use Packer
•What are typical application
scenarios of Packer

3. “I want a server”
“OK☺”

4. About 20 years ago…
Set up machine & network.. 2 hour
Install operation system.. 30 min
Install software.. N hour
Configuring & deploying.. N hour
1 day Setup machine, Setup OS, Manually setup software, etc
About 10 years ago…
We got VMware, VirtualBox..
We got Puppet, Chef, Ansible..
Everything is automatic!!
Setup machine is just one click..
Setup machine, Auto setup everything 3 hours

5. About 5 years ago…
We got clouds!
!
We don’t even need to
have our own machine!
!
What a perfect world..
Auto setup everything 30 mins

6. We trigger up a instance then trigger the auto-configure
tool, and we can just waiting..
!
I like AWS, I like Anisble, it make everything
automatical, what we need to do is just waiting..
Why we
Hold..
still have to
keep waiting ?

7. 1 min
Start up instance
30 mins
29 mins
Auto-configure server
Put
everything
into the
image

9. Usage

10. Packer Template File
1. {
2. "variables": {
3. "aws_access_key": "",
4. "aws_secret_key": ""
5. },
6. "builders": [
7. {
8. "type": "amazon-ebs",
9. "access_key": "{{user `aws_access_key`}}",
10. "secret_key": "{{user `aws_secret_key`}}",
11. "region": "us-east-1",
12. "source_ami": "ami-de0d9eb7",
13. "instance_type": "t1.micro",
14. "ssh_username": "ubuntu",
15. "ami_name": "packer {{timestamp}}"
16. }
17. ],
18. "provisioners": [
19. {
20. "type": "shell",
21. "script": "setup_things.sh"
22. }
23. ]
24. }
• builders (required)
• description (optional)
• variables (optional)
• provisioners (optional)
• post-processors (optional)

11. Packer Command-line
Inspect
packer inspect <template_file.json>
validate
packer validate <template_file.json>
fix
packer fix <template_file.json>
build
packer build [-var ‘variable_name=value_string’] <template_file.json>

12. Demo

13. Packer as part of pipeline
Developing Testing Delivering
★ Fit for small system
★ Deploying can be tedious for large system
★ Take longer time and more network bandwidth
with new test environment added

14. Packer as part of pipeline
Developing Testing Packing Delivering
Deliver images
Time saving
Safer deployment
Parallel builds

15. Product
Env.
Testing
Env.
Developing
Packer

16. Configure once, Use anywhere
—— Dr. Packer
http://www.packer.io
https://github.com/mitchellh/packer