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Packer vs Yocto: What are the differences?
What is Packer? Create identical machine images for multiple platforms from a single source configuration. Packer automates the creation of any type of machine image. It embraces modern configuration management by encouraging you to use automated scripts to install and configure the software within your Packer-made images.
What is Yocto? An open Source embedded Linux build system. It is an open source collaboration project that helps developers create custom Linux-based systems regardless of the hardware architecture. It provides a flexible set of tools and a space where embedded developers worldwide can share technologies, software stacks, configurations, and best practices that can be used to create tailored Linux images for embedded and IOT devices, or anywhere a customized Linux OS is needed.
Packer and Yocto belong to "Infrastructure Build Tools" category of the tech stack.
Some of the features offered by Packer are:
- Super fast infrastructure deployment. Packer images allow you to launch completely provisioned and configured machines in seconds, rather than several minutes or hours.
- Multi-provider portability. Because Packer creates identical images for multiple platforms, you can run production in AWS, staging/QA in a private cloud like OpenStack, and development in desktop virtualization solutions such as VMware or VirtualBox.
- Improved stability. Packer installs and configures all the software for a machine at the time the image is built. If there are bugs in these scripts, they'll be caught early, rather than several minutes after a machine is launched.
On the other hand, Yocto provides the following key features:
- Open source embedded Linux build system
- package metadata
- SDK generator
Packer is an open source tool with 9.23K GitHub stars and 2.5K GitHub forks. Here's a link to Packer's open source repository on GitHub.
Instacart, Oscar Health, and Razorpay are some of the popular companies that use Packer, whereas Yocto is used by Dronesmith Technologies, Koolicar, and Ubidreams. Packer has a broader approval, being mentioned in 151 company stacks & 163 developers stacks; compared to Yocto, which is listed in 6 company stacks and 4 developer stacks.
Pros of Packer
- Cross platform builds27
- Vm creation automation9
- Bake in security4
- Good documentation1
- Easy to use1
Pros of Yocto
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What is Packer?
What is Yocto?
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