Ask HN: Alternatives to HashiCorp Packer?

16 points by nimbius 2y ago ↗ HN

with the impending merger between IBM and Hashicorp, both OpenTofu and OpenBao exist as alternatives. Has an alternative to Packer been developed or proposed as part of the evacuation process from Hashicorp?

5 comments

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foobarkey 2y ago ↗

I am not using packer but happily using terraform/nomad/consul/vault - i have no problem with the license change

haiku2077 2y ago ↗

Even back in 2016 I saw Packer as a "complete" piece of software. Do you need anything from newer versions?

blaerk 2y ago ↗

If you’re using AWS there’s ImageBuilder, it’s by no means a drop-in replacement for packer and a closer look hints at just being ansible behind the scenes. You could probably achieve the same results with pure ansible and some cloud provider modules if needed. Ansible was bought by Redhat though, so still IBM, the licence is unchanged though

pella 2y ago ↗

"goldboot is approximately what you would get if docker and packer were mixed together. Instead of building containers or virtual machines, goldboot builds images for real hardware."

https://github.com/fossable/goldboot

notatoad 2y ago ↗

Maybe I was just using it wrong, but I never found packer to be all that valuable over a python or shell script.

Learning the DSL is more work than just doing the things it's trying to abstract away.