Packer images vs Vagrant images

Question

Mitchell Hashimoto said somewhere that vagrant should be not used in production. As I understand packer.io is exactly filling that gap - one can build EC2/Rackspace/.. images. What are the underyling differences in terms of virtualization? Both are VM's, but they must be different type of VM's. How does an AWS prebuild image different from a Virtualbox image or VMWare image? Any general hints at the underlying technologies would be appreciated.

Answer 1

Packer can be used to create vagrant boxes or production boxes.

"don't use vagrant in production" : vagrant boxes are built with security holes in it to allow smooth scripting/ssh/tunnelling/sudo (no passphrase, known password : vagrant).

It can be seen as kind of replacement for veewee

Production can be on

• your "laptop" (virtualbox)
• own datacenter or your client datacenter (vmware)
• in hosting service like (digital ocean/rackspace/...)
• more specific hosting like AWS

AWS prebuild image (AMI) helps a lot when using "auto scaling". When aws want to start a new server it starts with ready to start (no provisioning/deployment script at startup) See this presentation on how packer can fit with aws.

Answer 2

update: as far as I know the "security holes" are no more there so vagrant can absolutely be used to create production boxes.

Of course it's a production environment and so it requires some fine tuning of the services, but this is normal and has nothing to do with vagrant.