Setting Up Your First Golden AMI Pipeline with Packer

Now that you understand why golden AMIs and immutable infrastructure are essential in regulated environments, it’s time to start building. In this part, we’ll walk through creating your first golden AMI using HashiCorp Packer—a powerful image-building tool that lets you define your infrastructure images as code. You’ll write a Packer template in HCL2, apply provisioning steps to harden your image, and generate an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) that’s consistent, repeatable, and production-ready. You’ll have a working AMI pipeline you can later plug into AWS Image Builder or a CI/CD process.