Open-source tool for producing machine images. You describe builders and provisioners in a JSON or HCL template; on Azure it spins up temporary resources, customises a VM from a source image and then saves the result as a new image.
Also called Packer.
Read more: Microsoft Learn
In the Ultra Transcenders books
Each book explains HashiCorp Packer in context, with comparison tables and the common traps.
Terms in this definition
- Chat message roles
Labels on chat messages: instructions go under system, the person's input under user, the model's previous answers under assistant, and results returned by a called tool under tool (or function).
- Description (Image Analysis 3.2)
Visual feature in Image Analysis 3.2 that produces natural-language caption sentences sorted by confidence, read from Description.Captions[0].Text. Version 4.0 swaps it for Caption.
- JSON
Text-based format for structured data. ARM templates and Cosmos DB documents are written in it, and most Azure REST APIs exchange request and response bodies as application/json.
- HashiCorp Configuration Language
HCL: the declarative syntax Terraform and Packer templates are written in. Despite the initials, it has nothing to do with VMware's hardware compatibility list.
Related terms
- Azure VM Image Builder
Takes a source image, customises and generalises it, then distributes it, for example into Azure Compute Gallery; a managed service based on Packer.