So this week hit the first slowdown. Creating an AMI for Amazon was fairly straight forward due to the base OS images you use to create AMIs. Basically, you start with a basic Linux OS, with only some small utils to work with AWS smoothly, and you then install on top of that whatever you want: think HPCC Systems, plugins, etc...
The next platform that I decided to tackle was for Oracle's VirtualBox. The reason is because most people in the office seemed to be using VirtualBox, and is one of the platforms you can download on the website ( https://hpccsystems.com/download ). This is where it went a bit slower. First reason it goes much slower is during the packer.io process you install an entire OS in VirtualBox each time you make any changes to the script. You can't just stop 1/3 way through and make a checkpoint. Additional, to install Linux without any user input a preseed file is required. This was my first exposure to preseeds, and it presented a steeper learning curve than expected. However, once figured out, they are very powerful and make quick and automated work of installing an OS. Unfortunately, a slightly different one is required for each version of Linux. Oh well.