Nobody likes patching servers. Specially not Windows servers. And the problem becomes even worse with hybrid infrastructures where you have servers running both in AWS and in a datacenter. Packer is a tool for creating machine and container images for multiple platforms from a single source configuration. In this session we will talk about how we are trying to sort this problem at Wonga, using Packer to create a bakery of Windows servers which allows us to build up-to-date AMIs and VMWare templates from the same set of provisioning scripts.

1. BUILDING AN IMAGE BAKERY
WITH PACKER.IO
Ricard Clau - London WinOps - February 2016

2. PROBLEMSTRIEDTO SOLVE
• Need to automate creation of servers both
Windows (2008 & 2012) and Linux (mostly
Ubuntu 14.04)
• Hybrid infrastructure AWS / Datacenter
• Provisioning tools work well but a reliable and
reproducible common initial state is useful

3. WHAT IS PACKER?

4. EXTRA BENEFITS
• Massive boost at spinning servers
• Easy to share provisioning scripts
• Easier to understand than Chef / Puppet / Ansible
(different domain)
• Works on Windows, Mac and Linux!
• Significantly reduce manual patching

5. NO MORE PATCHING???
• You should create stateless applications so that
replacing servers by patched ones is not an issue
• Subscribe to these 2 AWS SNS topics:
• arn:aws:sns:us-east-1:801119661308:ec2-windows-ami-update
• arn:aws:sns:us-east-1:801119661308:ec2-windows-ami-private
• In VMWare, you can start from updated ISOs or
other existingVMWare machines

6. AWS EBS BUILDER
• Start from an existing patched AMI
• Initial userdata to allow WinRM and remote PS
• Packer can retrieve the random Admin password!
• Provision your box (and tag your final AMI)
• Sysprep to allow new userdata in EC2 instances

7. AWS EBS OUTPUT

8. AWS EBS OUTPUT (II)

9. VMWARE BUILDER (I)
• Start from an ISO or an existingVMWare box
• autounattend.xml files to automate installation,
Administrator password, initial PowerShell and
WinRM config, Power plan…
• You can add other initial provisioning scripts
(before 1st reboot) in the floppy_files array

10. VMWARE BUILDER (II)
• You need to install VMWare Fusion (MacOSx)
or Workstation (Linux / Windows)
• disk_type_id for differentVMDK options
• After reboot, you can use the same provisioners
we had in the AWS builder

11. VMWARE FUSION WORKING

12. WONGA BAKERY MODEL
Automation
Team
Development
Team

13. STILL ITERATING
• Feedback from different dev teams
• Spawn scripts / more automation around the bakery
• Add some CI/CD tools around it
• Using generated AMIs /VMWare boxes in a Terraform setup
• Trying to find out the best way to generate and use the
VMWare images in the datacenter

14. GIVE PACKER ATRY!
• Before 2016, I had never written any PS
• I had never used Packer before either
• In fact, I did not even know all this was possible!
• We produced working images in a week spike!

15. SPECIALTHANKS
• Mitchell Hashimoto for building Packer and the
rest of the HashiCorp stack
• Andrew Hardie for his talk “Don't go Packer in
anger” at London DevOps last October
• Peter Mounce for sharing his experiences
automating Windows at Just Eat

16. BTW… INCIDENTALLY
• We are hiring, like everybody else :)
• Does the HashiCorp toolset sound interesting?
• Do you like automating all-the-things?
• Do you want to work with us in these offices?

17. QUESTIONS?
• Twitter: @ricardclau
• E-mail: ricard.clau@gmail.com
• Github: https://github.com/ricardclau/packer-
demos