Building Machine Images with Packer: Templates, Builders, Provisioners, and CI/CD

Calendar February 22, 2026
Infrastructure
Intermediate
Image-Building, Packer-Templates, Multi-Cloud-Images, Image-Pipeline
Packer, Ami, Machine-Images, Golden-Images, Aws, Azure, Gcp, Docker, Ci-Cd, Image-Lifecycle
Packer, Ansible, Terraform, Aws-Cli, Gcloud, Az, Docker, Inspec

Building Machine Images with Packer#

Machine images (AMIs, Azure Managed Images, GCP Images) are the foundation of immutable infrastructure. Instead of provisioning a base OS and configuring it at boot, you build a pre-configured image and launch instances from it. Packer automates this process: it launches a temporary instance, runs provisioners to configure it, creates an image from the result, and destroys the temporary instance.

This operational sequence walks through building, testing, and managing machine images with Packer from template creation through CI/CD integration.