How to use packer to build AMI without SSH

Question

I would like to use packer to build AMI's where SSH is not running. This will be for immutable infrastructure. We will be building base / golden images and then building more streamlined images from the base image but, ultimately, I don't want SSH or any other means of remote access to the image. Can packer do this?

Answer 1

I'm not sure about Packer's ability to do this. However, you could use AWS Security Groups to control SSH access to your EC2 instances after they've been spun up using your AMIs.

Just create a Security Group that denies all ingress connections, and place your EC2 instance into it.