Packer is indisputably one of the tools that shouldn’t be missing from a DevOps Engineer’s ammunition. Its objective is to create identical machine images for multiple platforms (KVM, Vagrant, VMWare, AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Docker) from a single source configuration. Thus, it drastically shortens the time it takes to deploy new instances.
By baking our needed configuration into golden images, we also shift our mindset to immutable infrastructure. This in turn brings some major benefits, such as reducing the deployment time and configuration drifts.