Part 3: Advanced Customized Packer

Longer-term strategy for Packer includes lifecycle management for decommissioning old images and the optional usage of the HashiCorp Cloud Platform (HCP) Packer SaaS platform from HashiCorp. In this part, we will discuss image retention strategies and image ancestry to extend the image hierarchy concepts used in Part 2. We will discuss both the free tier of HCP and the paid version for advanced features. We will put together every manual step we explored earlier and automate them with continuous integration pipelines.

Finally, we will explore using Golang to write a simple plugin for systemd-nspawn containers. This is the most advanced topic covered in this book for when you find a new use case that Packer doesn’t currently support. Previous knowledge of Go will be important in this final chapter.

This part has the following chapters:

• Chapter 9, Managing the Image Lifecycle
• Chapter 10, Using HCP Packer
• Chapter 11...