Ask HN: Alternatives to HashiCorp Packer?

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

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

"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

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.

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