First AWS AMI

This is the hands-on lab for Section 6 of Packer 101. You write an amazon-ebs template that selects Ubuntu 24.04 LTS (Noble) from Canonical, launches a t2.micro builder in us-east-1, provisions a marker file with a shell provisioner, and registers a uniquely named AMI. You intentionally break the template, read the validate error, and fix it. After the bake you prove the AMI with the AWS CLI, then fmt and validate dummy Azure and GCP sidecar templates without building them. Cleanup deregisters the AMI and deletes its EBS snapshot so leftover images do not leak cost.

You will:

• Confirm Packer 1.16.0 and AWS credentials on the lab host
• Write aws-ubuntu.pkr.hcl with required_plugins amazon ~> 1.8 and a Noble

gp3 source_ami_filter

• Run packer init, fmt, and validate, then recover from a deliberate filter

and communicator mistake

• Build the AMI, prove it with aws ec2 describe-images, and validate Azure

and GCP sidecar templates

• Deregister the AMI and delete its snapshot