Alternatives to Packer
Image management has been a challenge for years. Packer is certainly not the first tool to address these difficulties. Tools such as Solaris JumpStart or Red Hat Kickstart have been used to codify VM installation. These can be used in conjunction with Packer to build uniform images across platforms. Packer may use a kickstart to deploy a Linux platform from standard media but then use provisioners to deploy tooling identically across Linux and Windows environments. Docker Compose and Buildah are also modern tools for building specialized container images. Often, specialized community tools such as this can supplement Packer while letting Packer provide a more general-purpose building tool to bring complex mixed environments into one single template. Red Hat Enterprise Linux users have the option of leveraging Red Hat Satellite for platform standardization using a combination of Kickstart, Cobbler, and Puppet.
Historically, simple scripting has been used for early infrastructure as code strategies. If configuration can be scripted, it can be version controlled and used to build and test images captured with either virtualization tools or image tooling such as Norton Ghost.
