Who this book is for

This book is for DevOps engineers, cloud computing customers, and even students or people who want to learn about computing platforms and infrastructure as code. Thanks to the platform-agnostic way HashiCorp projects are built with Golang, every example or use case within this book can be run on anything from a multi-million dollar mainframe to a basic cloud instance, or even a 10-dollar Raspberry Pi device. We will also cover automation, which can be explored with free online accounts.

This book is also for veteran Packer users who have developed templates with the old JSON format. Packer version 1.7 introduced two new format options for templates. A lot of existing example code and documentation are now supported as legacy. This book helps with the transition to HCL2 or PKR.JSON for new template development.

We will also dive a bit deeper and cover the basics of writing Packer plugins in Golang for those who encounter a niche or new use case that they would like added to Packer’s features.