Have you ever wanted to preconfigure your OS before deploying it to the cloud? Do you want an easy, reproducible way of creating custom cloud images? This is a job for Packer and Ansible. Packer is an open-source tool used to build automated machine images.

Packer allows you to specify the requirements for your image, from operating system to firstboot tasks, allowing you to be able to have reproducible cloud images. Packer also allows for provisioners, one of which being Ansible.

In this talk, we’ll pair Packer to build our image and Ansible to do an initial configuration of our image. Attendees will leave this session with an understanding of the benefits of custom cloud images, a knowledge of the tools to build custom images, and having seen these tools in action.