[PVE-User] Infrastructure as code with Proxmox: Building templates, automated VM/container provisioning

[Benjamin Hofer <benjamin@gridscale.io>]

Hi community,

after doing quite some research and testing of tools, I'm still looking for
a proper way of auto-provisioning VMs and containers on Proxmox
(infrastructure as code).
The goal is on the one hand to build base images, on the other hand to have
pipelines setup infrastructure like you would do on public clouds.

Terraform - The inofficial telmate/proxmox provider appeared to be
inreliable in many situations.
Ansible - There are some community modules, but also they weren't reliable,
parameters weren't honored etc.
Cloud-init - works OK, but is implemented in a way that appeared very
unusual to me. I'd expect to be able to pass user-data via the API
directly, like it's the case with many other well-known cloud providers.
Full, API-based automation is difficult with the current implementation.
Packer builder - might do for building VM images, but doesn't seem to
support cloud-init for instance.

Any ideas/thoughts? How to do IaC without writing everything on your own?
I'm quite new to Proxmox, so of course I may be wrong at some of these
points!

Thanks in advance.

All the best
Benjamin