What is Packer?
Packer automates the creation of any type of machine image. It embraces modern configuration management by encouraging you to use automated scripts to install and configure the software within your Packer-made images.
Packer is a tool in the Infrastructure Build Tools category of a tech stack.
Packer is an open source tool with GitHub stars and GitHub forks. Here’s a link to Packer's open source repository on GitHub
Who uses Packer?
Companies
201 companies reportedly use Packer in their tech stacks, including Instacart, trivago, and Razorpay.
Developers
354 developers on StackShare have stated that they use Packer.
Packer Integrations
Docker, Amazon EC2, VirtualBox, DigitalOcean, and Google Compute Engine are some of the popular tools that integrate with Packer. Here's a list of all 17 tools that integrate with Packer.
Pros of Packer
27
9
4
1
1
Blog Posts
+23 11
6822
+39 5
1458
Packer's Features
- Super fast infrastructure deployment. Packer images allow you to launch completely provisioned and configured machines in seconds, rather than several minutes or hours.
- Multi-provider portability. Because Packer creates identical images for multiple platforms, you can run production in AWS, staging/QA in a private cloud like OpenStack, and development in desktop virtualization solutions such as VMware or VirtualBox.
- Improved stability. Packer installs and configures all the software for a machine at the time the image is built. If there are bugs in these scripts, they'll be caught early, rather than several minutes after a machine is launched.
- Greater testability. After a machine image is built, that machine image can be quickly launched and smoke tested to verify that things appear to be working. If they are, you can be confident that any other machines launched from that image will function properly.
Packer Alternatives & Comparisons
What are some alternatives to Packer?
Docker
The Docker Platform is the industry-leading container platform for continuous, high-velocity innovation, enabling organizations to seamlessly build and share any application — from legacy to what comes next — and securely run them anywhere
Terraform
With Terraform, you describe your complete infrastructure as code, even as it spans multiple service providers. Your servers may come from AWS, your DNS may come from CloudFlare, and your database may come from Heroku. Terraform will build all these resources across all these providers in parallel.
Vagrant
Vagrant provides the framework and configuration format to create and manage complete portable development environments. These development environments can live on your computer or in the cloud, and are portable between Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.
Ansible
Ansible is an IT automation tool. It can configure systems, deploy software, and orchestrate more advanced IT tasks such as continuous deployments or zero downtime rolling updates. Ansible’s goals are foremost those of simplicity and maximum ease of use.
Git
Git is a free and open source distributed version control system designed to handle everything from small to very large projects with speed and efficiency.
