Building the solution

With our design in place, all we need to do is write the code that implements the design.

Packer

Our solution has a frontend and a backend application component. Although the application code is radically different, the way we build a VM image is not.

AWS plugin

As we discussed in Chapter 4, Packer – like Terraform – is an extensible command-line executable. Each cloud platform provides a plugin for Packer that encapsulates the integration with its services:

packer {
  required_plugins {
    amazon = {
      source  = “github.com/hashicorp/amazon”
      version = “~> 1.2.6”
    }
  }
}

Plugins need to be declared within a Packer solution. At the time of writing, the latest version of the AWS Packer plugin is 1.2.6.

The AWS plugin for Packer provides an amazon-ebs builder that will generate an AMI by creating a new VM from a base image, executing the provisioners, taking an Elastic Block Store (EBS...