In this chapter, we have seen how to install Packer and use it to create custom VM images. The VM image was made from two Packer templates: the first one using scripts and the second one using Ansible. Finally, we modified our Terraform code to use our VM image.

This chapter ends the implementation of IaC practices, starting with Terraform to provision a cloud infrastructure, then with Ansible for server configuration, and, finally, we finished with Packer for VM image creation.

With these VM images created by Packer, we will be able to improve infrastructure provisioning times with faster deployment, ready-to-use VMs, and, therefore, a reduction in downtime.

It is obvious that these are not the only IaC tools; there are many others on the marketplace, and we will have to do technology monitoring to find the ones that best suit your needs.

In the next chapter, we will...