consul-template VS Packer

The Hashicorp corporation has made a huge impact in providing valuable tools and platforms in the cloud ecosystem. The advantage of using the tools they provide, such as Terraform, Vault, and Packer, is that they all have the same language, Hashicorp Configuration Language (HCL). This means you can easily pick up any of these tools by learning HCL, which is similar to JSON. This approach can be useful when choosing tools to learn or use for a project.

Terraform is an open-source infrastructure as a code tool. It is designed by HashiCorp and written in Go Programming Language. Terraform is used to automate the creation of DevOps infrastructure and tasks. Terraform provisions and configures your DevOps infrastructure. It spins up new servers, creates load balancers, and node groups, and performs network configurations. Terraform is mostly applied to provision resources on cloud providers like AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. It can automate and provision infrastructure on any cloud platform. We will use Terraform to set up an Azure Kubernetes Service Cluster that has all the necessary cloud resources.

It can be time-consuming to create and manage the infrastructure that drives your software applications as they grow and become larger. Also, what about ongoing updates and releases of new features? Luckily, there is a solution to this problem in the form of a tool designed by Hashicorp called Terraform. This allows us to define our infrastructure in a central configuration file without having to create it on every provider platform we use.

HashiCorp Sentinel: Sentinel is a PAC tool developed by HashiCorp that can be used in tools such as Terraform, Vault, and Nomad. Sentinel supports writing rules in programming languages such as HCL to automate the enforcement of security and compliance policies.

Terraform is an infrastructure as code tool (IAC) created by HashiCorp that lets you automate cloud and on-prem resources. It uses configuration files written in HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL) to declare resources (infrastructure objects) and define dependencies between them. To put it simply, this tool allows you to write a few configuration files and build a whole system’s architecture on the cloud by running a couple of commands. I found this to be a more efficient alternative to clicking through a console to create resources manually.

It was clear back in 2021 that Lob needed to consolidate how we run code and none of our current tools were up to the task; it wasn’t a matter of if Lob would upgrade to something new, but when. The Platform team kicked off a research project to find Lob’s next service platform. Forever ago (back in 2019) we investigated migrating to Kubernetes, a popular but notoriously difficult-to-manage tool for this sort of thing, but that project fizzled out for many reasons, forcing us to consider something else. We chose Nomad which offers a comparable feature set to Kubernetes in a much more streamlined package. Nomad is developed by HashiCorp, a leader in the DevOps space, and is used by companies like Pandora, Cloudflare, Internet Archive, and Roblox.

If however, you have an application service that needs support for 2+ ports, because you know, Kubernetes supports this, I would recommend avoiding Consul Connect, as it is not functional to meet minimum requirements for a service mesh. Perhaps someday, when Hashicorp prioritizes basic functionality and usability in future version, this product can be considered.

Looks a lot like Hashicorp (a technology company), maybe too similar, and not particularly evocative IMO.

AWS VPC is a simple example. This feature really shines when building reusable infrastructure-as-code for Network Firewall or even Network ACLs. Anything that simplifies something and reduces or eliminates any hacks required to reach a logical outcome is super valuable. Great work finally driving this one home HashiCorp.

The missing piece of puzzle is the AMI "golden image" that will be used to start the instances in autoscaling group. The AMI has to have NGINX and PHP installed with the list of required modules enabled. The great tool to brew one is hashicorp packer.

To manage a VM, you can use something as simple as just manual actions over SSH, or can use tools like Ansible, Hashicorp's Packer and Terraform or other automations. For an app where there is minimal load and security/reliability concern, VMs are still a great option that provide a lot of value for the buck

Server templating: Using Packer has never been easier to create reusable server configurations in a platform-independent and documented manner.

I'll give you hard, but rewarding and easy to modify(once you know what you're doing) way. Packer may be a thing you're looking for.

It is straightforward to build them with packer (I have built AMIs for 13.0 and 13.1, but 13.2 should be exactly the same). I've been meaning to write a blog post about it for a while, but have not gotten to it yet... In any case, what I am doing is using the EBS Surrogate Builder to start an instance running the official FreeBSD 13.2 image with an extra volume attached and run a script to create a zpool on the extra volume and bootstrap and configure FreeBSD 13.2-RELEASE on it. After that packer takes care of creating an AMI out of that extra volume, so you can use it... If you have any issues, let me know, and maybe I will finally get to writing that blog post...

HashiCorp Packer is a tool for creating machine images for a variety of platforms, including AWS, Azure, and VMware. It allows you to define machine images as code and supports a wide range of configuration options.

Packer is a tool that can be used to build machine images. Basically, it takes a base image, runs a series of steps to provision that image, and then burns a new image. In my workplace we use it heavily to build AWS AMIs. But it has an ARM plugin that looks to be very very suitable for building customised Raspberry Pi images (my quick read of the doco there says it can go ahead and write the final image to an SD card for you too).

Seems related to https://github.com/hashicorp/packer/issues/12118 But the workaround discribed in the comments doesn’t seems to work anymore

I'd suggest using a tool like Packer to build a gold image based on your base AMI and all your changes. Then you'll have your own AMI you can launch new instances with.