Summary

This chapter has taught you the basics of using Packer to build a machine image, using Amazon AWS as the target. We have covered the most important plugins Packer offers to customize an AMI. We then built a custom image that installed multiple packages with the apt tool, downloaded and installed other tools, set up directories and users, and finally, set up a system agent to run with systemd.

We have covered how to use the Goss tool to validate your images and how to integrate Goss into Packer using a plugin developed at Yale.

Finally, we have shown you how to create your own plugins to extend the capabilities of Packer.

Now, it is time to talk about IaC and how another of HashiCorp's tools has taken the DevOps world by storm. Let's talk about Terraform.