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  1. Stackups
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  3. Hashicorp Sentinel vs Packer

Hashicorp Sentinel vs Packer

OverviewComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Packer
Packer
Stacks587
Followers566
Votes41
Hashicorp Sentinel
Hashicorp Sentinel
Stacks26
Followers28
Votes0

Packer vs Hashicorp Sentinel: What are the differences?

Developers describe Packer as "Create identical machine images for multiple platforms from a single source configuration". 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. On the other hand, Hashicorp Sentinel is detailed as "Policy as code framework for HashiCorp Enterprise Products". Sentinel is an embeddable policy as code framework to enable fine-grained, logic-based policy decisions that can be extended to source external information to make decisions.

Packer and Hashicorp Sentinel belong to "Infrastructure Build Tools" category of the tech stack.

Some of the features offered by Packer are:

  • 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.

On the other hand, Hashicorp Sentinel provides the following key features:

  • policy as code
  • Fine-grained, condition-based policy
  • Multiple enforcement levels

Packer is an open source tool with 10.1K GitHub stars and 2.79K GitHub forks. Here's a link to Packer's open source repository on GitHub.

Detailed Comparison

Packer
Packer
Hashicorp Sentinel
Hashicorp Sentinel

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.

Sentinel is an embeddable policy as code framework to enable fine-grained, logic-based policy decisions that can be extended to source external information to make decisions.

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.
policy as code;Fine-grained, condition-based policy; Multiple enforcement levels; Multi-cloud compatible
Statistics
Stacks
587
Stacks
26
Followers
566
Followers
28
Votes
41
Votes
0
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 27
    Cross platform builds
  • 8
    Vm creation automation
  • 4
    Bake in security
  • 1
    Good documentation
  • 1
    Easy to use
No community feedback yet
Integrations
Amazon EC2
Amazon EC2
DigitalOcean
DigitalOcean
Docker
Docker
Google Compute Engine
Google Compute Engine
OpenStack
OpenStack
VirtualBox
VirtualBox
Nomad
Nomad
Vault
Vault
Terraform
Terraform
Consul
Consul

What are some alternatives to Packer, Hashicorp Sentinel?

AWS CloudFormation

AWS CloudFormation

You can use AWS CloudFormation’s sample templates or create your own templates to describe the AWS resources, and any associated dependencies or runtime parameters, required to run your application. You don’t need to figure out the order in which AWS services need to be provisioned or the subtleties of how to make those dependencies work.

Scalr

Scalr

Scalr is a remote state & operations backend for Terraform with access controls, policy as code, and many quality of life features.

Pulumi

Pulumi

Pulumi is a cloud development platform that makes creating cloud programs easy and productive. Skip the YAML and just write code. Pulumi is multi-language, multi-cloud and fully extensible in both its engine and ecosystem of packages.

Azure Resource Manager

Azure Resource Manager

It is the deployment and management service for Azure. It provides a management layer that enables you to create, update, and delete resources in your Azure subscription. You use management features, like access control, locks, and tags, to secure and organize your resources after deployment.

Habitat

Habitat

Habitat is a new approach to automation that focuses on the application instead of the infrastructure it runs on. With Habitat, the apps you build, deploy, and manage behave consistently in any runtime — metal, VMs, containers, and PaaS. You'll spend less time on the environment and more time building features.

Google Cloud Deployment Manager

Google Cloud Deployment Manager

Google Cloud Deployment Manager allows you to specify all the resources needed for your application in a declarative format using yaml.

AWS Cloud Development Kit

AWS Cloud Development Kit

It is an open source software development framework to model and provision your cloud application resources using familiar programming languages. It uses the familiarity and expressive power of programming languages for modeling your applications. It provides you with high-level components that preconfigure cloud resources with proven defaults, so you can build cloud applications without needing to be an expert.

Yocto

Yocto

It is an open source collaboration project that helps developers create custom Linux-based systems regardless of the hardware architecture. It provides a flexible set of tools and a space where embedded developers worldwide can share technologies, software stacks, configurations, and best practices that can be used to create tailored Linux images for embedded and IOT devices, or anywhere a customized Linux OS is needed.

GeoEngineer

GeoEngineer

GeoEngineer uses Terraform to plan and execute changes, so the DSL to describe resources is similar to Terraform's. GeoEngineer's DSL also provides programming and object oriented features like inheritance, abstraction, branching and looping.

Atlas

Atlas

Atlas is one foundation to manage and provide visibility to your servers, containers, VMs, configuration management, service discovery, and additional operations services.

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