Build Golden AMIs with Packer and AWS CodePipeline
When leveraging AWS services such as EC2, ECS, or EKS, achieving standardized and automated image creation and configuration is essential for securely managing workloads at scale. The concept of a Golden AMI is often used in this context. Golden AMIs represent pre-configured, hardened and thoroughly tested machine images that encompass a fully configured operating system, essential software packages, and customizations tailored for specific workload. It is also strongly recommended to conduct comprehensive security scans during the image creation process to mitigate the risk of vulnerabilities. By adopting Golden AMIs, you can ensure consitent configuration across different environments, leading to decreased setup and deployment times, fewer configuration errors, and a diminished risk of security breaches. In this blog post, I would like to demonstrate how you can leverage AWS CodePipeline and AWS Stepfunctions, along with Terraform and Packer, to establish a fully automated pipeline for creating Golden AMIs.
