The Future of HCP Packer — HashiConf Global 2021

HashiCorp Cloud Platform (HCP) now includes a public beta of managed Packer image pipelines and the registry. Learn why it's more than just "Packer in the Cloud".

Packer is used by hundreds of thousands of practitioners to create identical machine images for multiple platforms from a single source configuration. HCP Packer is the Packer registry as a managed service on the HashiCorp Cloud Platform, enabling entire teams to track how images are used across deployments. It's a multi-cloud image gallery that doesn't focus on hosting the images, it hosts metadata, allowing you to smoothly manage large image pipelines. 

»In this Talk

Packer Engineering Lead Megan Marsh will announce the public beta of HCP Packer in this talk and provide a small demo of the HCP Packer registry.

»Background on HCP Packer

As images are provisioned across deployments, it can be difficult to figure out who maintains what, how images have changed over time, where they are deployed, and how to update them. This is especially problematic when performing critical system updates or resolving security issues.

HCP Packer addresses those issues by helping DevOps teams automate build management across provisioning pipelines. To note: it’s not just “Packer in the cloud.” HCP Packer lets your team integrate custom metadata into your existing Packer images, which is then used to track how those images are used across other images and throughout deployments.

This is a critical part of any multi-cloud environment because it helps you track the lifecycle of images across clouds, and automate image updates across the Packer and Terraform lifecycle.