aws

Fedora reigns supreme as my Linux distribution of choice when I deploy new workloads to public clouds. It gives me a well-tested, modern Linux system with tons of helpful tools. Fedora’s cloud images provide a great base to begin building a cloud deployment, but sometimes I find myself wanting a highly customized image with some features I care about. For example, I may want some packages pre-installed that aren’t included with the default cloud image, or I may want certain services stopped or started at boot time....

GitHub Actions provides infrastructure for all kinds of amazing automation. Anyone can test software, build packages, deploy applications, or even publish a blog (like this one!) with a few snippets of YAML. I often use it to bundle my software in a container after testing it. 🤖 One day, as I was working through another Packer configuration, I wondered if there was a way to build cloud images directly in GitHub Actions without building an instance in the cloud, making tons of changes, and snapshotting that image....

The AMIs provided by most Linux distributions in AWS work well for most use cases. However, there are those times when you need a customized image to support a certain configuration or to speed up CI processes. You can get a customized image via a few methods: Build from an existing AMI, customize it, and snapshot it. Use an automated tool, such as Packer, to automate #1. Build your own image locally in KVM, VMware, or Virtualbox and upload the image into S3, import it into an EC2, and create an AMI from the snapshot....