Packer, Terraform and Jenkins - IaC & CD for small stacks

Not everything revolves around docker containers and kubernetes, some environments pine for evolution of existing models & practices.
Although this talk is about VMs and baking AMIs, it’s not really a step inside a time machine to ~2010.

We’ll walk though some sane patterns for:

• building AMIs in a Jenkinsfile pipeline using packer
• testing AMIs in a Jenkinsfile pipeline using InSpec
• building test stacks using terraform from inside a Jenkinsfile pipeline, validating AWS infra using InSpec
• mapping branches to terraform environments and tfvars files
• using that same pipeline to deploy to production

The talk is based on the experience of building out a real-world example of AMI based small stacks in https://github.com/jenkins201/packer-terraform-cicd-aws