Great Solid Tool for Team Development
December 01, 2016
Great Solid Tool for Team Development
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Vagrant
With literally dozens of development environments, spread both throughout the company's development computers and our servers, it was becoming more and more daunting a task to keep them all integrated, concise and consolidated. There were just too many bugs whenever a new scenario showed up as we configured the new one, rendering one too many previous ones inoperable.
Vagrant became the main staple for the company's developers, as we all were part of both the research and the development tasks at the company. So, switching projects - as well as keeping various scenarios at the same time on our servers - really became a breeze for everyone. Now, every new task of research that involves a new set of technology, comes with a vagrant up command, which is nice and simple to deal with the incompatibilities, so common in this industry.
Vagrant became the main staple for the company's developers, as we all were part of both the research and the development tasks at the company. So, switching projects - as well as keeping various scenarios at the same time on our servers - really became a breeze for everyone. Now, every new task of research that involves a new set of technology, comes with a vagrant up command, which is nice and simple to deal with the incompatibilities, so common in this industry.
- Maintaining many virtualized machines at the same time
- Multiple platform support
- A lot lighter if compared with VMBox
- The end of "it's working at my computer" kind of excuse when things break at production
- If possible, it could be lighter than its alternatives.
- Improve the way boxes work, to make it easier to update and/or find
- For simple out-of-the-box tasks Vagrant is pretty simple to use, but for much more real-life and complex tasks, it can become quite daunting to configure a box and make it available/distributable to all the company's computers.
- With Vagrant, we were able to make the entire team ready for a project start with a minimum time cost, as each machine would ship the same vagrant box.
- As soon as the project is ready either for testing at our staging servers or production ones, there's no longer the fear of the so famously known "environment differences" deployment bugs. As our servers contain exactly the same machine as the developers use, thus delivering more confidence to the team and trust for the salesmen.
- The learning curve was quite steep to get the devops team ready for configuring and maintaining the virtuallized machines throughout the company
- LXC and Docker
In comparison to Docker, Vagrant is a lot easier to create its [containers] boxes, than it is with Docker. Our company already dealt with and its devops team knew somewhat well the way of Vagrant, so it was quite natural to go Vagrant when trying to choose which would be our virtualized machine tool. Many of our developers were mainly developing and researching from Windows machines, so LXC [which back then was our second best choice] was not really a choice for these collaborators.