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Otto and Vargrant like technologies make me nervous and here is why: I recently took a contract assignment in a dev shop that use vagrant. If everything worked

Otto and Vargrant like technologies make me nervous and here is why: I recently took a contract assignment in a dev shop that use vagrant. If everything worked as advertised , I should have just done vagrant up and my jbosss appserver etc. would have automatically built and deployed for me so that I could focus on code. However, I had to spend a couple of day trying to fix Vagrant salt issues --- that I had no clue about. I could have easily setup a jboss linux vm without breaking a sweat but debugging vagrant and salt was like a solving a mystery wrapped in an enigma. So now that I am upto speed with vagrant and salt , it does not seem all that bad -- but I do feel as though it has been overhyped. I shudder to think that the dev manager are now adding "must have xx yeas of solid vagrant experience " along with "must have 5 years of [some ide]" in their skills requirement.

geerlingguy 11y ago
Vagrant just boots a VM and runs a provisioner on it (at a basic level). I'm guessing that even if you started a VM and installed Linux on it by hand in VirtualBox, the Salt config would've given you some trouble. A lot of configurations I see in the wild that are used with Vagrant and/or with cloud VMs are extremely brittle and have a lot of unwritten assumptions built in.
- tonyarkles 11y ago
  I've been using Vagrant lately to spin up clean VMs to run Ansible against, and that's definitely something that you have to be very very careful about. I'm currently looking at setting up Jenkins to frequently re-provision from a clean VM, just to keep an eye on me to make sure I don't accidentally introduce a change that breaks things. So far, I think the only real assumption my users have to deal with is that you need a full source tree checkout, not just the smaller part with the Ansible playbooks. The project uses Subversion, so it's quite easy to just checkout a subtree of the project instead of the whole thing. Which users did and immediately discovered how broken things are in that situation :)

geerlingguy 11y ago

Vagrant just boots a VM and runs a provisioner on it (at a basic level). I'm guessing that even if you started a VM and installed Linux on it by hand in VirtualBox, the Salt config would've given you some trouble. A lot of configurations I see in the wild that are used with Vagrant and/or with cloud VMs are extremely brittle and have a lot of unwritten assumptions built in.

tonyarkles 11y ago
I've been using Vagrant lately to spin up clean VMs to run Ansible against, and that's definitely something that you have to be very very careful about. I'm currently looking at setting up Jenkins to frequently re-provision from a clean VM, just to keep an eye on me to make sure I don't accidentally introduce a change that breaks things. So far, I think the only real assumption my users have to deal with is that you need a full source tree checkout, not just the smaller part with the Ansible playbooks. The project uses Subversion, so it's quite easy to just checkout a subtree of the project instead of the whole thing. Which users did and immediately discovered how broken things are in that situation :)