Terraform V/S Packer

[Deepak Sharma]

Hi Group Members,

I am a noob to these tools. What I understood from documentation is "I can create AMI image on AWS using terraform's AWS_AMI_FROM_INSTANCE resource". Which is the sole purpose of packer.

I am not sure in use case, where I need to create EC2 instance and configure it, then create an image; should I use packer anyway? What other advantages can a packer have? Why these are two tool instead of one? I mean there should be some specific reason for both of those.

Any link/doc will be helpful.

Thanks for kind responses.

Deepak

[Ian Duffy]

Packer should only be used for creating your AMIs, if you wish to bake some configuration, package, text file, etc. use packer.

Terraform is for orchestrating the deployment of your applications including but not limited to:

 - security group configuration

 - load balancer configuration

 - provisioning of instances, bootstraping and executing them to some configuration management solution

 - etc.

Terraform maintains a state and allows you to go back and manipulate the infrastructure. 

Please google and read the appropriate documentation around both tools to understand their full functions. 

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[Deepak Sharma]

Hi Ian,

Thank you very much for reply and elaborating on rollback with terraform. This primarily helps, this was initial doubt and was not getting some clear difference. I am reading through documentation as well :)

Deepak

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Thanks & Regards
Deepak Sharma

[David Maze]

On Wednesday, May 18, 2016 at 1:49:16 PM UTC-4, Deepak Sharma wrote:

I am a noob to these tools. What I understood from documentation is "I can create AMI image on AWS using terraform's AWS_AMI_FROM_INSTANCE resource". Which is the sole purpose of packer.

I am not sure in use case, where I need to create EC2 instance and configure it, then create an image; should I use packer anyway? What other advantages can a packer have? Why these are two tool instead of one? I mean there should be some specific reason for both of those.

Creating an AMI has a pretty specific lifecycle pattern: create an instance, provision it, stop it, create disk snapshots, create the AMI, wait (a long time) for it to become available, destroy the instance.  Packer does a good job of encapsulating that specific pattern.  It's a little outside Terraform's core space, though; Terraform doesn't have a good way to say "this instance must exist but only as long as this other operation is going on".

I use Terraform+Packer+Ansible, and totally ignore the Terraform AMI building support.  That does mean that, if I build a new AMI, I need to manually change the AMI number in my Terraform source files.

[Deepak Sharma]

Hi David,

Thanks a lot for the reply. I understand it how packer is specialized for AMI creation, where terraform on other hand deployment having less focus on Image creation. Thanks Ian and David for sharing the knowledge.

Deepak