Building a custom AMI using Packer

Now that you understand the rationale for building a custom ECS container instance image, let's introduce a tool called Packer, which allows you to build machine images for a wide variety of platforms, including AWS.

Packer is an open source tool created by HashiCorp, which you can find out more about at https://www.packer.io/. Packer can build machine images for a wide variety of target platforms, however in this chapter we will only focus on building Amazon Machine Images.

Installing Packer

Before you can get started using Packer, you need to install it on your local environment. Packer is supported for Linux, mac OS, and Windows platforms, and to install Packer for your target platform, follow the instructions located at https://www.packer.io/intro/getting-started/install.html.

Note that Packer is widely supported in operating systems and third-party package management tools—for example, on mac OS you can install Packer using the Brew package manager by...