Vagrant VM's

[Tyndyll]

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NOTE: This is a resend. Wanting see if there is any more interest - sending it three days before Christmas maybe wasn't my smartest move..

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Hello all,

A while back Toby gave a presentation on Vagrant and one of the recurring concerns was the availability of "good" VMs, where good incorporated concerns including security and the software installed.

I have a question - how much would you consider paying for a "good" VM? This would incorporate having an image available in your choice of distribution with a basic configuration e.g. Web development with apache and Postgres installed and configured to best practices, multiple VM Hadoop cluster with communication already set up etc. How much would you consider paying for a dedicated custom VM (your version of ruby and gems installed)? Would you prefer a single payment or do you like the idea of an annual maintenance contract where packages are updated with security fixes?

Finally - anyone fancy trialling it? As you can tell by the fact that I have no business plan at all I'm curious to see if this is a viable idea, so any (related :) thoughts and comments would be welcomed.

Cheers
Simon

[Simon McCartney]

Interesting - how much of a "good VM" relies on matching your final environment?  i.e. using packer or some of the other image builders to build something you can run via vagrant locally, but also in a IaaS of your choice?  Or matching what a heroku/engineyard/paas-du-jour offers?

One of the things HP have done is use Cloudify[1] to "build an environment" for you, and for PaaS they are using Stackato from ActiveState[2], would it make sense to provide vagrant boxes that match known paas platforms? 

[1] http://www.hpcloud.com/blog/running-gigaspaces-cloudify-hp-public-cloud, https://marketplace.hpcloud.com/cloudify

[2] https://marketplace.hpcloud.com/stackato, http://www.hpcloud.com/blog/installing-activestate-stackato-hp-public-cloud

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Simon McCartney

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[Simon McCartney]

I should have added:

Full Disclosure, I work for HP Cloud, helping deploy & build OpenStack clouds & services.

[Tyndyll]

The simple answer is, I’m not sure

If I’m remembering correctly the issues being raised on the night were a lack of confidence in the box being used, in terms of its security and what is being installed and its suitability to the task at hand. My goal was to produce a base operating system configured according to best practices (unessential services and software removed, ports closed etc) and then add, for lack of a better term, software packs on top. To that end, if the PaaS environment is known, I think having that as an option would be viable. 

A worry was the amount of time wasted in trying to get a working environment, and when one was established keeping up with updates, and I think this is what I’m trying to aim at

Simon