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Vagrant: Create and configure portable development environments

vagrantup.com

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Re: Vagrant: Create and configure portable development environments

#71

Post by jacques_chester »

ibrahima wrote: post #69
a3n wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The version control aspect is really great. It's really nice to be able branch, commit, merge, go back, whatever with your installed infrastructure. This gets even better if you use puppet or chef (or even the shell) for provisioning of infrastructure in concert with vagrant. Doing the same thing with snapshots and VM clones with VirtualBox alone is similar to zipping your project periodically as a backup strategy. Y…

Huh, so can you "branch" a VM with vagrant? Like say I want to make some incompatible/lossy changes to my database schema, can I fork my dev environment, do my migrations to the new schema, and then go back if I don't like it?

Vagrant works by describing a machine or group of machines. It hands off to Chef or Puppet, which then do the job of bringing the naked machine up to something nearly identical to your production environment.

You can snapshot to binary blob too, but having code that rebuilds from scratch is a great way to smoke out certain classes of dependency conflicts. It also provides assurance that if a hurricane turns some data centre into lego bricks, you can rebuild an identical setup somewhere else with a single command.

Re: Vagrant: Create and configure portable development environments

#72

Post by elithrar »

mitchellh wrote: post #9

Vagrant creator here. What a pleasant surprise to see this pop up on HN this morning (it was unexpected, to be sure). I just want to shamelessly say that if you're more of a book person, the Vagrant O'Reilly book I wrote was just released this week, and it is a great way to get started: http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920026358.do Thanks! (And, hopefully as you know, as an author I make barely any royalties on an…

> http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920026358.do

If you have any input over the sample chapter, it'd be nice if it could represent a portion of a "real" chapter of the book. Right now it just provides the "how to install Vagrant" section, which isn't really representative of the book's content.

Re: Vagrant: Create and configure portable development environments

#73

Post by Terretta »

jacques_chester wrote: post #70
spoondan wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not the OP, but: These systems are broadly the same. If you're writing your configuration from scratch, they're all fairly pleasant, and it's mostly a matter of preference. They share most of the same concepts (although the terminology differs) and features. In my experience, their differences are primarily in feel and community. For feel: Chef gives you Ruby pretending to be declarative. Puppet and Ansible give…

Chef and Puppet are quite different, in my opinion. Based on my exposure, Chef ultimately boils down to being a complex remote execution framework. Puppet makes detect-and-correct more central to its model. http://chester.id.au/2012/06/27/a-not-sobrief-aside-on-reign...

Interesting comparison, but shoukd be mentioned that Dell, AWS, and others, are leveraging knowledge around Chef.

Re: Vagrant: Create and configure portable development environments

#74

Post by jacques_chester »

Terretta wrote: post #73
jacques_chester wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chef and Puppet are quite different, in my opinion. Based on my exposure, Chef ultimately boils down to being a complex remote execution framework. Puppet makes detect-and-correct more central to its model. http://chester.id.au/2012/06/27/a-not-sobrief-aside-on-reign...

Interesting comparison, but shoukd be mentioned that Dell, AWS, and others, are leveraging knowledge around Chef.

And Citrix, Rackspace and Oracle are using Puppet ("leveraging knowledge"? pls no).

Appeals to authority don't tell us anything about the technology except that somebody we've heard of is using it.

Re: Vagrant: Create and configure portable development environments

#75

Post by 1123581321 »

rytis wrote: post #55
1123581321 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How have you found Chef to be and what alternatives did you consider? We are evaluating Chef and Ansible right now.

Just curious - why is Puppet not on your shortlist?

It's on the list, too, but I (possibly incorrectly) see Chef and Ansible having a more similar philosophy and workflow to each other than to Puppet so I am hoping to eliminate one of them.

Re: Vagrant: Create and configure portable development environments

#76

Post by daemon13 »

WestCoastJustin wrote: post #48
daemon13 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for screencasts - your episode 5 is missing audio making it harder to grock the context, just heads up in case this is unintended so you can fix

Ouch, this is the first report I have had! What OS/browser are you using? You can download the raw content via these two files, so you can watch locally on your computer (both the same, just different formats): http://sysadmincasts.com/static/videos/5-create-a-vagrant-box-with-veewee.mp4 http://sysadmincasts.com/static/videos/5-create-a-vagrant-box-with-veewee.webm I am using a javascript player, which should send yo…

I am using FF 20.0 on Ubuntu 10.04.

Re: Vagrant: Create and configure portable development environments

#77

Post by Terretta »

jacques_chester wrote: post #74
Terretta wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting comparison, but shoukd be mentioned that Dell, AWS, and others, are leveraging knowledge around Chef.

And Citrix, Rackspace and Oracle are using Puppet ("leveraging knowledge"? pls no). Appeals to authority don't tell us anything about the technology except that somebody we've heard of is using it.

Dell and Amazon leveraged chef to help build Crowbar and Opsworks respectively. Crowbar ... leveraging ... get it?

In any case, noting Opsworks is based on Chef is not an "appeal to authority".[1] That knowing Chef means you have a head start on AWS's official devops tooling, seems a relevant data point for a comparison. (The officially supported devops tooling leveraging a particular CM system is different from simply being able to be managed by a CM system.)

As for Rackspace, here's the CM category of their dev blog:

  http://developer.rackspace.com/blog/categories/configuration-management/
And here's "How Rackspace Uses Chef to Deploy OpenStack in the Private Cloud":

  http://developer.rackspace.com/blog/cooking-with-chef4.html
Quoting a different Rackspace article from Feb 2013:

The Rackspace Private Cloud Certification team sought out and tested a number of bare metal provisioning tools. While there are a number of excellent tools on the market, none seemed to fit quite well. On one hand, some tools were all-encompassing in scope and would try to provide an end-to-end solution. On the other hand, tools were too narrow in scope and provided a solution for a specific operating system or did not provide an appropriate amount of flexibility.

Eventually, we picked a deployment model consisting of a combination of tools that would provide the right balance of features and flexibility. We chose the Razor provisioning engine, combined with the OpsCode Chef configuration management tool.

1. http://plover.net/~bonds/bdksucks.html

Re: Vagrant: Create and configure portable development environments

#78

Post by apolzon »

pixelmonkey wrote: post #17

We switched from hand-configured boxes and a long, "full stack local" setup document to chef + vagrant at my current company ( http://parse.ly ). Though it caused some kicking & screaming on the development team, the end result is that every developer has the same development environment, which pretty much matches our deployment environment (in Rackspace Cloud). I also just kicked off our summer intern class, and the…

@pixelmonkey i recently implemented a chef/vagrant deployment to the rackspace cloud. I'm extremely curious how you managed to share the setup between rackspace cloud and local vagrant boxes. I used the vagrant-rackspace plugin, and it seemed like I would need a separate vagrantfile for local vs remote deployments.

Re: Vagrant: Create and configure portable development environments

#79

Post by AckermanMD »

mapleoin wrote: post #19

Vagrant is a nice tool, but I don't like the closed-open source part of it. There are 289 open issues and 79 open pull requests on github right now. It feels like there is a huge community out there who want to move this project forward, but there is the bottleneck of having only one committer who wants to have too much control over it. It's fine and the author can do what he wants, but I'm wondering what the project…

And just to prove how cool @mitchellh is (or at least to prove the fact that he takes HN comments seriously), he has added another committer to Vagrant today.

https://twitter.com/mitchellh/status/344231860009828352

Re: Vagrant: Create and configure portable development environments

#80

Post by bradgessler »

mitchellh wrote: post #44
bradgessler wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious, why the focus on development environments? How does it tie into production and staging environments?

I'm working on this now. I won't say much more than that until I have something to really show for it. Development environments are the primary focus on Vagrant because that was the pain point it was initially meant to solve, and it does this quite well. The workflow model Vagrant introduces doesn't translate as well into staging/production yet. I'm actively investigating the use cases here and how Vagrant may adapt…

Cheers for staying focused and honest about the scope of the problem that vagrant solves!
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