Erid — Unified Cloud Images
A single, reproducible machine-image pipeline that builds identical golden images for multi-cloud and on-prem environments with Packer and Terraform.
The problem
Running the same workloads across more than one cloud and a set of on-prem hosts usually means maintaining a separate base image for each target. Those images drift: a package pinned in one place and not another, a hardening step applied to AWS but forgotten on the bare-metal fleet. Drift is where reliability and security problems quietly start.
The approach
Erid treats the machine image as a build artifact with one source of truth. A single Packer definition produces a golden image, and the same provisioning and hardening steps run regardless of where that image will land — a cloud AMI, an Azure or GCP image, or a local VM/on-prem template. Terraform then consumes those images so infrastructure is stood up from the exact artifact that was built and tested, not a hand-tweaked snapshot.
The result is that "the base image" means the same thing everywhere, every build is reproducible from source, and hardening is applied uniformly instead of per-platform.
Notes
This write-up is a working draft — swap in the specific targets, hardening baseline, and CI details once they're settled.