Creating or baking your own Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) is a key part of systems administration in AWS. Having a prebaked image helps you provision your servers faster, easier, and more consistently than configuring them by hand.

Packer is the de facto standard tool that helps you make your own AMIs. By automating the launch, configuration, and cleanup of your instances, it makes sure you get a repeatable image every time.

In this recipe, we will create an image with the Apache web server pre-installed and configured. While this is a simple example, it is also a very common use case.

By baking in your web server, you can scale up your web serving layer to dynamically match the demands on your websites. Having the software already installed and configured means you get the fastest and most reliable startup possible.