HashiCorp Packer in Production

8

Scaling Large Builds

In the previous section, we demonstrated strategies for a structured image hierarchy, involving building shared base images and aggregate sub-images that extend the purpose of the common base image. We used a serial build script to build several image trees one at a time. The strategy is to separate these logically so that they can be built in parallel in the quickest possible time. If a minor patch is applied to our gold image, rebuilding it across AWS, Azure, and GCP one at a time will be painfully slow, and it will take a long time to learn of errors at a later stage. When building across multiple environments and complex image trees, development time becomes very important. This will set us up for automation when, ...