Summary
Don’t be discouraged if it takes a while to perfect your workflows. A lot of trial and error is part of the development process with Packer templates and CI automation. The important thing is to get comfortable with an automated workflow that helps make minor changes to Packer templates without manually running builds along the way.
The sample code for this chapter shows examples of GitHub Actions and GitLab CI pipelines. They can be browsed and customized, but to try these yourself, you will need to fork the repo or create your own in GitHub or GitLab and add your own runner where appropriate. Runners use a pull mechanism that can enable a public or a private VCS platform such as GitHub or GitLab to trigger automatic builds even behind firewalls or private networks.
Automation provides instant collaboration and audit trails for a team to edit Packer templates using a GitOps workflow and view the full history of logs for any build in the past. As the logs from...