Grand conclusion

As we come to a close, I hope you’ve learned some helpful tricks to add to your Packer templates. Even though Packer is one HashiCorp’s simplest tools and projects, it’s incredible what you can do with it. Often, people think of Packer as just a tool for building cloud images. Packer is that and much more, with the ability to build and test everything from mobile applications on ARM devices to embedded microcontroller applications and containers. All of this can be done within a single template or template directory. Remember, a lot of old Packer code is written in a legacy JSON format that is still supported for backward compatibility, but new templates should be written in HCL2 or the new pkr.json format.

Don’t forget the cost savings from making sure your application is built and tested for alternative architectures such as ARM or AArch64 and AWS Graviton. This step alone can save you 50% or more on your compute spend. Also, being...