Building an Amazon Machine Image

Packer supports a wide variety of plugins that are used by the program to target a specific image format. For our example, we are going to target the Amazon Machine Image (AMI) format.

There are other build targets for Docker, Azure, Google Cloud, and others. You may find a list of other build targets here: https://www.packer.io/docs/builders/.

For images that are used in cloud environments, Packer plugins generally take an existing image that lives on the cloud provider and lets you repackage and upload the image to the service.

And, if you need to build multiple images for multiple cloud providers, containers, Packer can do simultaneous builds.

For Amazon, there are currently four methods for building an AMI:

• Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) launches a source AMI, provisions it, and then repackages it.
• Amazon instance virtual server, which launches an instance VM, rebundles it, and then uploads it to S3 (an Amazon object storage...