image-spec VS Packer

A buildpack is a software, designed to transform application source code into executable (OCI) images that can run on a variety of cloud platforms. At its core, a buildpack is a directory that includes a specific file named buildpack.toml. This file contains metadata and configuration details that dictate how the buildpack should behave. Buildpacks in simple terms, is a set of standards defining how the different steps that are required to build a compliant container image can be automated. Using those standards, there are projects that have been built round enabling that using an CLI or an API. The most common way of doing that is through the Cloud Native Buildpacks' Pack project. Pack is a CLI command that can run in the same system the developers are using to actually go through creating a Dockerfile.

Eventually, once zstd support gets fully supported, and tiny gzip compression windows are not a limitation, then compressing a full layer would almost certainly have a better ratio over several smaller layers

https://github.com/opencontainers/image-spec/issues/803

Please note that label-schema has been superseded by https://github.com/opencontainers/image-spec/blob/main/annotations.md<^

GitHub Container Registry stores container images within your organization or personal account, and allows you to associate an image with a repository. It currently supports both the Docker Image Manifest V2, Schema 2 and Open Container Initiative (OCI) specifications.

We build all services as containerized workloads, i.e., OCI images - sometimes called Docker images. We deploy these to the Kubernetes product offered by the cloud vendor. Whenever we need some capability, containers are the answer. This insulates our applications from the vendor. In principle, we could switch providers as long as Kubernetes is available.

Build images with anything that makes OCI compliant images, push, and profit.

it's funny that you mention this because it is actually the thing that is next on my agenda for the image, as you can probably see already I bake in OCI image annotations in our image, which is great for including some core pieces of meta data. In addition to this though I will soon be including custom labels for Base64 encoded YAMLs for Kubernetes deployments using this image. I will look at including helm configuration as well. Then it should be just as easy as: $ docker pull registry.gitlab.com/crafty-controller/crafty-4:latest $ docker image inspect registry.gitlab.com/crafty-controller/crafty-4:latest | jq -r ".[].Config.Labels.\"org.arcadiatech.crafty.k8s.deployment\"" | base64 -d | kubectl apply -f -

They still don't do anything really of substance, they're just gateways to their vendor's world - booking systems, payment systems, etc. You learn those as you go along. Yes, as a potential employee, you need to be able to tick those boxes on your CV, but if you understand the underlying technology, it's mostly a matter of booking your own AWS or Azure server for $5-10 a month for a few weeks, and fooling around. (Docker is a bit different in the sense that they were the first to popularize today's de-facto container image standard, the "Docker container", which has since been accepted as a proper standard and renamed to "OCI image format"; but at the end of the day, at this point in time, Docker in itself is still just a company out for the money, and the multi-GB installation of their product can, for the essential functionality part, be replaced by a few hundred lines of Bash code. The cool boys today don't use Docker, they use [Podman(https://podman.io/), which is essentially a much more lightweight drop-in replacement ;-) )

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.