Continuous integration of an operating system

Question

I want to hire a VPS but my problem is that most if not all of the VPS companies out there expect me to work with it as is and if I want to majorly upgrade it, I must, backup everything I have added on top of it, delete the OS and then install a new version of the OS from the VPS hosting company's own interface (the one I used for installing the old version) and then bring all additional information from the backups. In other words, there is no "continuous integration" of an operating system.

A plausible solution to this problem is shared hosting where the staff takes care for everything OS related but if one still wants a VPS and to have a continuously integrated OS both minorly and majorly, what could be done with todays available software, if at all?

Answer 1

You could use Major Public Cloud Providers (AWS, Azure, GCP) or any other Location (Hetzner Cloud, Linode, digitalOcean etc) [list]that is supported by Packer.

With Packer you can build and maintain your system image and customize it.

Each time you want to upgrade you can build a new image. By building the new image you can choose the base image version you will build on run your modifications on. Image is saved on the provider.

Finally you deploy your new server with the image you created and finally you dispose the old infrastructure, with the help of Terraform.
Since packer read code you treat it like any other code.