Deploy elastic crystal report infrastructure using Packer & Terraform on AWS

If you are using Crystal Reports part of your product stack in AWS then this tutorial might help you to deploy infrastructure in almost no time with some configuration changes based on your need.

Even if you are not using crystal and trying to figure out Image creation and deployment of instances in the automated method then this will provide you a high-level idea. You can eliminate crystal specific resources from both of the repositories provided and make it work for your needs.

This tutorial is to create an Elastic crystal report infrastructure in AWS. Having a CI/CD pipeline for building images and deploying EC2 instances helps towards the goal of Infrastructure as a Code (IaaC). You can use any CI/CD tool of your choice like GitLab, Jenkins, or any other. This tutorial is based on two repositories. First to build AWS Image and a second one to deploy EC2 instances using the Image built-in step 2.

High level overview of CI/CD Pipeline:

AWS Keys are used as a variable only for this blog and tutorial purpose. Recommended approaches are using Vault to get credentials from there or use Role to assume for automated infrastructure deployment.