Adding an AWS EC2 AMI build

If you don’t have a development vSphere instance lying around, never fear. We’ll cover cloud instances now, which are readily available to anyone. To develop these templates, I’m actually using sandbox environments from a third-party learning platform called Instruqt that HashiCorp uses for learning. If you need an isolated short-lived cloud account or just don’t want to risk racking up a large cloud bill, there are a variety of tools and options like this, but Instruqt is preferred, as it uses HashiCorp Terraform in its backend and can give the user simultaneous cloud accounts across AWS, Azure, and GCP for a preset time. Once development templates have been perfected, they can be pushed to production or a lifecycle managed by HCP Packer, which we’ll cover in Chapter 9, Managing the Image Lifecycle.

AWS has an extensive API to manage images and AMI libraries. For workloads that aren’t ready to go cloud-native...