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page_title: Why use Packer
description: |-
  Learn about the advantages of using Packer to automate the creation of machine images and artifacts.
---

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> [!IMPORTANT]  
> **Documentation Update:** Product documentation previously located in `/website` has moved to the [`hashicorp/web-unified-docs`](https://github.com/hashicorp/web-unified-docs) repository, where all product documentation is now centralized. Please make contributions directly to `web-unified-docs`, since changes to `/website` in this repository will not appear on developer.hashicorp.com.
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# Why use Packer

This topic describes why you should use Packer to automate the creation of machine images over traditional _pre-baked_ images, which are pre-configured digital images that include the necessary software, settings, and data.

## Pre-baked images

Pre-baked machine images have a lot of advantages, but most people have been unable to
benefit from them because images have been too tedious to create and manage.
There are either no existing tools to automate the creation of machine images
or they had too high of a learning curve. The result is that, prior to Packer,
creating machine images threatened the agility of operations teams, and
therefore aren't used, despite the massive benefits.

Packer changes all of this. Packer automates the creation of
any type of machine image. It embraces modern configuration management by
encouraging you to use a framework such as Chef or Puppet to install and
configure the software within your Packer-made images.

## Advantages of using Packer

**_Super fast infrastructure deployment_**. Packer images allow you to launch
completely provisioned and configured machines in seconds, rather than several
minutes or hours. This benefits not only production, but development as well,
since development virtual machines can also be launched in seconds, without
waiting for a typically much longer provisioning time.

**_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. Each environment is running an identical machine image,
giving ultimate portability.

**_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.

**_Greater testability_**. After a machine image is built, that machine image
can be quickly launched and smoke tested to verify that things appear to be
working. If they are, you can be confident that any other machines launched from
that image will function properly.