HashiCorp Vagrant vs. Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform

I would recommend this tool to a colleague looking to create a repeatably deployable local dev environment based on their staging and production environments. I would recommend this mostly for individuals or teams requiring environments with server-side software such as php, et al. There are likely less processor-heavy and smaller tools for simpler projects.

Incentivized

For automating the configuration of a multi-node, multi-domain (Storage, VM, Container) cluster, Ansible is still the best choice; however, it is not an easy task to achieve. Creating the infrastructure layer, i.e., creating network nodes, VMs, and K8s clusters, still can't be achieved via Ansible. Additionally, error handling remains complex to resolve.

Incentivized

• Vagrant is decentralized so anyone can make a container package to get a project started. you aren't limited to wordpress, or even one style of wordpress install (you can make a sage.io wordpress environment).
• Vagrant easily lets you set ports and URLs for local development.
• I have yet to have a problem with Vagrant, as opposed to MAMP and DesktopServer, which both gave me SQL or other issues.

Incentivized

• Debugging is easy, as it tells you exactly within your job where the job failed, even when jumping around several playbooks.
• Ansible seems to integrate with everything, and the community is big enough that if you are unsure how to approach converting a process into a playbook, you can usually find something similar to what you are trying to do.
• Security in AAP seems to be pretty straightforward. Easy to organize and identify who has what permissions or can only see the content based on the organization they belong to.

Incentivized

• Because Vagrant is a low-level tool with many ways to configure it, there is a steep learning curve. You don't just have to learn (or install) Vagrant, but also Virtualbox, Ansible and possibly some Vagrant plugins to keep boxes up to date.
• Support on Windows doesn't seem great. I'm a Mac guy, so it's been very difficult getting things to work as expected when a developer wants to work on Windows.
• Perhaps I didn't configure it correctly, but the default shared folders are not the best for performance. There are also frequently weird issues regarding file permissions.

Incentivized

• I can't think of any right now because I've heard about the Lightspeed and I'm really excited about that. Ansible has been really solid for us. We haven't had any issues. Maybe the upgrade process, but other than that, as coming from a user, it's awesome.
• Give out Lightspeed for free.

Incentivized

Vagrant is fast, versatile and does exactly what we need it to do: spin up virtual servers for local development fast and without trouble.

Incentivized

Even is if it's a great tool, we are looking to renew our licence for our production servers only. The product is very expensive to use, so we might look for a cheaper solution for our non-production servers. One of the solution we are looking, is AWX, free, and similar to AAP. This is be perfect for our non-production servers.

Incentivized

A GUI would be nice for entry level users.

Incentivized

It's overall pretty easy to use foe all the applications I've mentioned before: configuring hosts, installing packages through tools like apt, applying yaml, making changes across wide groups of hosts, etc. Its not a 10 because of the inconveinience of the yaml setup, and the time to write is not worth it for something applied one time to only a few hosts

Incentivized

Great in almost every way compared to any other configuration management software. The only thing I wish for is python3 support. Other than that, YAML is much improved compared to the Ruby of Chef. The agentless nature is incredibly convenient for managing systems quickly, and if a member of your term has no terminal experience whatsoever they can still use the UI.

Incentivized

There is a lot of good documentation that Ansible and Red Hat provide which should help get someone started with making Ansible useful. But once you get to more complicated scenarios, you will benefit from learning from others. I have not used Red Hat support for work with Ansible, but many of the online resources are helpful.

Incentivized

I spoke on this topic today!

Incentivized

I liked lando better because lando seemed extremely easy to setup compared to other VM's and it seemed faster though that project was simpler. Virtualbox I ran on windows and it has a gui and has often been slow. The vagrant boxes I used did well but had slightly more problems than lando.

Incentivized

AAP compares favorably with Terraform and Power Automate. I don't have much experience with Terraform, but I find AAP and Ansible easier to use as well as having more capabilities. Power Platform is also an excellent automation tool that is user friendly but I feel that Ansible has more compatibility with a variety of technologies.

Incentivized

• Vagrant is free - It requires a bit of extra technical knowledge in terms of setup, but since it costs nothing it's an excellent resource
• It can be time consuming to learn, but once you get a good handle on it you're in good shape.

Incentivized

• POSITIVE: currently used by the IT department and some others, but we want others to use it.
• NEGATIVE: We need less technical output for the non-technical. It should be controllable or a setting within playbooks. We also need more graphical responses (non-technical).
• POSITIVE: Always being updated and expanded (CaC, EDA, Policy as Code, execution environments, AI, etc..)

Incentivized