Example: Terraform and Packer. You use Packer to package your apps as VM images. You then use Terraform to deploy servers with these VM images and the rest of your infrastructure, including the network topology (i.e., VPCs, subnets, route tables), data stores (e.g., MySQL, Redis), and load balancers.

This is also an easy approach to get started with, because there is no extra infrastructure to run (Terraform and Packer are both client-only applications), and you’ll get plenty of practice deploying VM images using Terraform later in this blog post series. Moreover, this is an immutable infrastructure approach, which will make maintenance easier. However, there are two major drawbacks. First, VMs can take a long time to build and deploy, which will slow down your iteration speed. Second, as you’ll see in later in this blog post series, the deployment strategies you can implement with Terraform are limited (e.g., you can’t implement blue-green deployment natively in Terraform), so you either end up writing lots of complicated deployment scripts or you turn to orchestration tools, as described next