
Ask HN: Use Packer in Production? - albertlie
Anyone has experience on using packer in production? Could you share your use cases for using Packer? And any drawbacks that you experience using that tool?<p>Thanks
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Sevii
We use packer to reproducibly create VM images for our aws deployments. Going
on 3+ years and multiple clients now. The biggest pain point for me has been
having multiple small bash lines in the json spec packer uses.

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albertlie
Interesting. Thanks for the sharing, Sevii!

1\. For your AWS deployment, could I know why you didn't use docker image for
your deployment?

Because essentially you can use docker for building the image instead of
packer. Furthermore, Docker also has caching mechanism which make the build
much faster. I'm not sure packer also has capabilities for caching.

Any reason you choose packer over docker?

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badloginagain
Not OP, but we dont use docker because legacy. We developed our infrastructure
before containerization was popularized.

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albertlie
Gotcha.

Ah also one thing that I wonder in Packer is versioning. Since in docker we
can tag every release of the image, we can somehow do versioning on that.

1\. How is the versioning in Packer?

2\. Also, do you have plan to adopt docker image/ other containerization
pattern even if you already used packer for 3+ years? Maybe you have different
use cases for adopting docker?

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badloginagain
1\. We just commit packerfile to repo and version through git 2\. We've talked
about it. The problem is we have some stateful processes we can't trust to
container- like database stuff/etc. So its really a matter of separating what
is safe to containerize or not.

