HashiCorp Packer Reviews & Insights

We mainly use packer for creating Images on the fly with required tunning and use it with Our Configuration management tools or any IAC tool. We integrate Packer with multiple frameworks such as Chef or Puppet to install and configure the software. It acts for me as Machine Image As A Code. The main scope for us to use Packer is to automate our Image creation process and get away from the Golden Image concept so that we can bring Updated images in an automated way.

We use packer to generate new machine images for multiple platforms on every change to our Configuration Management tools like Chef/Puppet/Ansible It's act single tool for Image building for Multi-provider like AWS/Azure/GCP Helps to achieve Dev/Prod Parity Packer itself doesn't have a state like Terraform. You can't do packer output AMI ID. If you have a scenario where you want to maintain the state for images it would be tough to manage via Packer.