Packer is a tool for creating identical machine images for multiple platforms

Hey everyone. Packer guy here. I&#x27;ve been working on Packer the past couple months and I think its time to bring this to the public. I&#x27;m happy to answer any questions you have.<p>I want to stress that this is the _first public release_. There is a lot of work to be done and a lot of improvements to be made. It may not be &quot;production ready&quot; but it is definitely &quot;experimentation ready.&quot; Although I know many companies already starting to use this in production.<p>I also want to note that although I made Vagrant as well, Packer is not tied to Vagrant in ANY WAY. Packer stands on its own as an extremely useful tool. However, Packer can be used to make Vagrant boxes, as well.<p>ENJOY!

Okay, can someone please explain Packer&#x2F;Vagrant&#x2F;etc to me? The way I currently provision is using ansible, I have a script that goes from bare machine to serving the site in one command (<a href="http://www.stavros.io/posts/example-provisioning-and-deployment-ansible/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.stavros.io&#x2F;posts&#x2F;example-provisioning-and-deploym...</a>).<p>How does something like Packer&#x2F;Vagrant help me? From what I understand, all they do is create a VM, which just takes two seconds in VirtualBox anyway. There must be a benefit, since everyone is using them, but I&#x27;m missing it. Can anyone please explain?

For anyone coming from veewee, there is a tool for converting templates to packer: <a href="https://github.com/mitchellh/veewee-to-packer" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;mitchellh&#x2F;veewee-to-packer</a>

Can Packer meaningfully work with Docker.io? I gather there is some overlap, but is there a way they can work together? It seems to me:<p>* Packer abstracts creation of images.<p>* Vagrant abstracts running images, via a VM, and applying changes to images (via chef&#x2F;puppet, although that seems to overlap with Packer as well).<p>* Docker seems to abstract both creation of images (via docker build) and running of images (albeit only on top of LXC).<p>To complicate things further, it seems like Vagrant has some initial support for running (Linux) images on top of LXC (via Fabio Rehm&#x27;s plugin) and possibly on top of Docker (although the state of the plugin for this is vague).<p>All this stuff seems very powerful, but the overlap is confusing. My head hurts...

I&#x27;m curious where this fits in with my Vagrant&#x2F;chef workflow where I load a virtual environment with vagrant and provision both development environments and production environments with chef.<p>Seems as though there&#x27;s some overlap between how I provision environments and where this tool fits in. What would be the advantages moving this away from my provisioning tool and towards Packer?

Sounds interesting for sure. I don&#x27;t see any built-in ability to generate qcow2 style images though. Are you going to add that? There are ways to convert (like from a virtualbox image), but having the built-in ability to create qcow2 would be great. Even better would be having a keystone&#x2F;glance connector to upload generated images to Openstack!

Can Packer build Windows images?

Packer mentions continuous delivery in the intro documentation[1]. Is there a scenario where you install the result on existing systems or do you rolling deploys with new VMs all the time ? I&#x27;m specifically thinking of services that need to maintain state like databases where the second scenario is not very handy.<p>[1]: <a href="http://www.packer.io/intro/use-cases.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.packer.io&#x2F;intro&#x2F;use-cases.html</a>

Surprised not to see support for KVM.

I could totally use this! The only question I have is can you exclude certain things. I&#x27;d want to clone 95% of a production server but then would need to exclude SSL settings and such.

This is seriously ambitious! Glad to see it, a tool for cloning existing boxes was the first thing I went looking for when I started using Vagrant.

Not to be confused with <a href="https://github.com/keenerd/packer" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;keenerd&#x2F;packer</a>

Is there any PXE boot support with Packer ? How does Packer compare to Cobbler + Koan ?

Is it possible to build AMIs offline? Why is it starting an instance for the source AMI?

May I als you why you choose golang, I am just interested im your opinion.

Written in Ruby as well?<p>Edit: Just Checked GitHub, it is Written in Go, Interesting..... Another sign of Ruby being painfully slow.

would I use this instead of vagrant or with vagrant?

neat!