Packer Alternatives

Terraform is an open-source infrastructure as code software tool created by HashiCorp. It allows infrastructure to be expressed as code in a simple, human readable language called HCL (HashiCorp Configuration Language). The Terraform CLI automatically reads configuration files and provides an execution plan of changes, which can be reviewed for safety and then applied and provisioned.

Vagrant is an open-source software building portable and virtual development environments. With Vagrant, developers and devops can create development environments that mirror production environment by providing the same operating system, packages, users, and configurations. Vagrant can be spin up environments for VirtualBox, KVM, Hyper-V, Docker containers, VMware, and AWS, and integrates with exiting configuration tooling such as Ansible, Chef, Docker, Puppet or Salt

Ansible is an open-source software provisioning, configuration management, and application-deployment tool. With Ansible you can streamline your deployment process, allowing you to roll out enterprise scale applications with the bush of a button or a command via the terminal. Ansible itself is written in Python and has a minimal learning curve, allowing you to build simple setup procedures that can manage all of your CI/CD needs.

VirtualBox is a free and open-source hosted hypervisor for x86 virtualization, developed by Oracle. The software is used to create virtual machines that can be used for testing, and building software in virtually contained environments. VirtualBox is available for on macOS, Linux. Windows, Solaris and OpenSolaris.

Dokku is a free and open-source project that helps you build and manage the lifecycle of applications. With Dokku developers can setup their own PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service) in a matter of minutes. Dokku provides extra plugins which can be used to manage database, and tools needed for your application. If you need to server your application over HTTPS, Dokku got you covered as well, with the help of Let's Encrypts free TLS certificates.

Nanobox is the simplest way to deploy and manage a flexible cloud infrastructure. With Nanobox you can run a modern cloud infrastructure with power and peace of mind.

Kubernetes is an open-source system for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications.. It groups containers that make up an application into logical units for easy management and discovery. Kubernetes builds upon 15 years of experience of running production workloads at Google, combined with best-of-breed ideas and practices from the community.

Apache Mesos a free an open-source cluster orchestration platform. It allows you to allocate dynamic resource between applications and enables you to build fault-tolerant and elastic distributed systems. With Apache Mesos, your applications are only aware of the resources of a particular partition or machine they are running on. It also provides an abstract view of all resources used by any application in the system, where you can allocate resource, per application basis. Apache Mesos is battle-tested and industry proven to easily scale to 10,000s of nodes.

Swarmlet is a free and open-source, self-hosted Platform as a Service that runs on any single server. It's mainly intended for use with multiple servers, a server cluster / swarm. Swarmlet is inspired by Dokku and brings the same simplicity to Docker Swarm. Swarmlet also uses Traefik v2 and Let's Encrypt to provide automatic SSL and load balancing on your apps.