Using Vagrant for local development environment at BancVue

[Ryan McKay]

I have put together a blog article about how my group at BancVue uses Vagrant for local development.  I'll talk about the use case at today's Dev SIG lunch, and if people want, we can dig in further.

http://againstentropy.blogspot.com/2015/01/vagrant-for-local-development.html

[Ryan McKay]

There was a question at the dev sig lunch about why do we use a custom vm image.  I followed up with our sys ops team and got some additional info.

• That image is produced using Hashicorp's Packer tool, which is "an open source tool for creating identical machine images for multiple platforms from a single source configuration."  In our case, the two platforms are open stack for shared envs and prod, and virtualbox for localdev vagrant.
• Criteria for what goes in the image, and what gets configured by puppet is what you would expect
• How often it changes - rarely changed things more likely to be baked into the image
• How slow/fast it is to perform - slow processes like updating the local apt-get repository from what was on the original debian iso tend to be baked in, so that provision time is shorter