Team 💙 Packer, Go Worker, Job Board updates August 2016

Hello from 💙 again. Continuing Igor's update for Terraform, I
I wanted to talk about additional on-goings with our build infrastructure.

As Terraform manages configured infrastructures for AWS, GCE, Packer manages configured machine images.

What is a machine image?

A machine image provides the information required to launch an instance, which is a virtual server in the cloud. In Travis' case, a build vm that can run jobs. You specify a machine image when you launch an instance, and you can launch as many instances from the source image as you need. You can also launch instances from as many different source images as you need.

Different images on different infrastructures.

As we run builds on AWS, GCE, and MacStadium, we have specific machine images for each specific cloud compute infrastructure. On AWS, this is called an AMI, on GCE this is generically called an "image" for which we further call a googlecompute image for clarity. We also have docker images that push out to quay.io. MacStadium images.

Each image includes the following for its corresponding infrastructure:

1. A template for the root volume for the instance (for example, an operating system, a boot loader, a root filing system, an application server, and applications)
2. Launch permissions that control which (AWS/GCE/etc) accounts can use the (AMI/googlecompute) to launch instances
3. A block device mapping that specifies the volumes to attach to the instance when it's launched