Packer for initial Puppet / Jenkins servers

[antgel]

Hi all, Packer newbie here.

Those of you following the Terraform and Puppet MLs may have come across my posts (1, 2) about whether I should have master Puppet / Jenkins environment that handle configuration and deployment across all AWS VPCs (environments), or a Puppet / Jenkins instance per VPC.

Packer came up as part of these threads, and I have a question. Is there any point in using Packer for initial images for Puppet / Jenkins servers? Currently, my plan is to bring up Puppet masters via AWS userdata, and bring up Jenkins masters via terraform. I see Packer as having more of a use case for spinning up application servers, but is it also useful / recommended in the initial bootstrapping of the infrastructure?

[Rickard von Essen]

A snapshot (AMI) is much more predictable than launching an EC2 with a gigantic user-script that installs a big system. The draw back is that you have to re-spin the image regularly to update. I immutable servers have the same pros and cons regardless if they are the core of your infrastructure management or the business application.

--
This mailing list is governed under the HashiCorp Community Guidelines - https://www.hashicorp.com/community-guidelines.html. Behavior in violation of those guidelines may result in your removal from this mailing list.
 
GitHub Issues: https://github.com/mitchellh/packer/issues
IRC: #packer-tool on Freenode
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Packer" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to packer-tool+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/packer-tool/9eb10f44-262e-4f74-a1a2-2fb9fc1e264e%40googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.