This repository holds the example code and pipelines of our SogetiLabs Packer whitepaper with ready-to-use templates and yaml files.
Virtual machines (VMs) have been around for decades and will continue to be part of our on-premises and cloud estates for many more years to come. Handling these at scale requires automation, from the infrastructure up until the actual OS and image layer. This whitepaper will guide teams taking their first steps into treating their VMs on a massive scale instead of each individual VM manually. The shift in mindset requires understanding of the tooling, and an understanding that the fundamental difference in maintenance shift from logging in and running scripts on a per-VM basis to the declarative approach using Infrastructure-as-Code and tools like Packer for creating images that can be rolled out on a large scale. This whitepaper will show the first steps and has hands-on examples for teams to start automating VM deployments on a large scale using HashiCorp Packer, HashiCorp Terraform and Microsoft’s Cloud Azure.