Support the creation of images as a task using packer
Packer is a versatile tool, especially when working in a multi-cloud environment. It can be used for both creating both base gold images that can then be fully built on later or fully built imputable images.
I see an octopus step being able to be used to:
1) create or pull (from a repository) & update a json template with variables & transformation.
2) next packer validate
3) packer builds the image.
ideally, there would also be an "Octopus" provisioner for packer that would allow the download of repos, call templates, transforms, variables install tenticle via cli
but even it only did the first three you could still use existing PowerShell & bash scripting
The resulting image details ( from packer manifest provisioner) could then be returned to octopus as variables to be used in other process tasks such as launch an instance that octopus would then manage.

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Marcus James Adams commented
I've since been told that there is no need for this as packaged has be run on the deployment target with scripts.
This will not work as packer needs to run on the octopus server or worker in the same way that terraform does. This is really needed.
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Marcus James Adams commented
Terraform support is in place, packer is the missing link to allow Octopus to function as a full DevOps CI/CD platform