Packer AMI

Building the custom AMI images for mongodb for various cloud platforms and also for various linux distributions.

Tech

• [Packer] - Packer is a free and open source tool for creating golden images for multiple platforms from a single source configuration.
• [Shell] - A script to provision mongo distribution on AMI image.

Installation

Install packer using below documentation

https://www.packer.io/intro/getting-started/

Configuration

You can pass custom configuration to template.json before you build the image.

• base_ami: Base ami id on which it will provision the mongo db. Ex: ami-0fd7e4b8e94538bef
• region: In which region to upload this custom image. Ex: ap-south-1
• mongo_version: Version of mongo db. Ex: 4.2
• ami_version: Tag the version to custom ami. Ex: v1.0

To build image

Before we take this template and build an image from it, let's validate the template by running

$ packer validate template.json

Before you build the image on cloud platforms, you need to setup authentication. To setup authentication follow below documentation

https://www.packer.io/docs/builders/amazon/#authentication

Building custom images on AWS:

$ cd Packer-AMI
$ packer build template.json -var region=ap-south-1 -var ami_version=v1.0 -var mongo_version=4.2 -var base_ami=ami-0fd7e4b8e94538bef

Once you have done above steps, it will produce the AMI image with below name ubuntu-18.04_mongodb-4.2_v1.0

Note: If you dont specify any configuration, it will take default configuration.

Build Images in CI/CD

To automate the process of building images in CI/CD you can follow the below documentation:

https://www.packer.io/guides/packer-on-cicd/build-image-in-cicd/

You can import the Jenkinsfile to automate the CI/CD using jenkins.

Deployment

As packer is tool for creating custom images, they don't have any deployment options. You can use your own deployment options using CI/CD.

Refer the below documentation to upload your artifacts to cloud:

https://www.packer.io/docs/templates/post-processors/