Packer support

[tamuseanmiller]

Is your feature request related to a problem?

The problem that we're looking to solve is being able to manage our ephemeral runners with something like Packer from another repository in git.

What solution would you like?

From a high level, we would love to do something like pull a packer image from something like Artifactory and then use that to create/start the VM rather than manually creating a VM the first time or running scripts. Our goal is to manage the runners entirely without having to touch the host machine itself.

What alternatives have you considered?

We can probably do about 80% of what we want with just pre and post scripts but it would be much more concise as we can use packer across the board as well. We just wouldn't be able to manage the size or resources of the VMs that are created if we do it this way.

Any additional context?

No response

[simonbs]

I'd love to see something like this in Tartelet as well. At Shape, we also have scripts in place to create an image using Packer, but they are not yet integrated into our infrastructure.

Unfortunately, I do not have the capacity to work on this feature right now, but I'm happy to help design it and review PRs if anyone is up for taking a swing at it.