You can use terraform to spin it up but a lot of that becomes un-necessary as that is assuming you are deploying a linux vm or something similar. Packer itself

You can use terraform to spin it up but a lot of that becomes un-necessary as that is assuming you are deploying a linux vm or something similar. Packer itself would be totally replaced with something like OPS - https://ops.city https://ops.city as ops produces machine images for the various hypervisors - but to be clear - you don't have to use ops but nothing else gives you a cloud deploy in 2 min and 2 commands. OPS allows you to pass quite a lot of configuration related switches/options/etc: https://nanovms.gitbook.io/ops/configuration https://nanovms.gitbook.io/ops/configuration and config files that you need on disk can be copied in at build time too. Env vars and such can be injected as well. If you want to keep using a secret store like Vault that's totally fine and up to you and your application needs. As mentioned in the article some companies use volumes to rotate certs every few hours/day via volumes so the sensitive stuff is separated from deploys.