David Aquino

Why use Packer? Infrastructure as code has become part of the buzzword bingo surrounding operational teams and their desired optimal workflows.

One could theoretically just start with a base AMI and manually update it and then re-save it as a new AMI, but this process is not repeatable.  We can check in our desired infrastructure states as code to version control.  This is good practice for change control management.  We can readily see what worked before and what was changed in the latest update.  If something catastrophic happens or we encounter unforeseen issues, we can always rollback to a previous

We have a .NET application that has been running for years, but once a week, the application fails to recover and needs the server needs to be rebooted.  To preemptively reboot the EC2 instance nightly we decided to use Docker and ECS  scheduled tasks.

Here is what the finished Dockerfile looks like:

FROM amazonlinux:latest

RUN yum -y update
RUN curl https://bootstrap.pypa.io/get-pip.py -o get-pip.py
RUN python get-pip.py
RUN pip install boto
COPY ./win_reboot.py /root/
RUN chmod +x /root/win_reboot.py

CMD ["/root/win_reboot.py"]

ECS has a