Vagrant: Virtualized Development Environments Made Simple

Track: Cloud
Skill Level: Intermediate
Room: Room 103
Time Slot: Mon 2/18, 4:00 PM
Abstract

Have you ever wished that your local development sandbox could look exactly like production, but you’ve got a mismatch between your local OS and your production OS? And what about the age old “it works on my machine” excuse that quite often stems from differences between developer sandboxes? Many have turned to virtualization, creating a machine image that can be passed around the team. But who manages the template? How do you keep things in sync?

In this session, we’ll explore Vagrant (http://www.vagrantup.com), an open source tool that allows you to easily create and manage virtual development environments that can be provisioned on demand and “thrown away” when no longer needed.

Our agenda will include:

  • Creating new base OS templates using the Vagrant Veewee plugin
  • Creating a new development box using Vagrant
  • Provisioning the box using Puppet
  • Provisioning the box using Chef
  • Deploying a simple web application to a multi-box development environment
  • Packaging and distributing the box within your team
Matt Stine

Matt Stine is a 17 year veteran of the enterprise IT industry, with eight of those years spent as a consulting solutions architect for multiple Fortune 500 companies, as well as the not-for-profit St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. He is the author of Migrating to Cloud-Native Application Architectures from O’Reilly, and the host of the Software Architecture Radio podcast.

Matt is obsessed with the idea that enterprise IT “doesn’t have to suck,” and spends much of his time thinking about lean/agile software development methodologies, DevOps, architectural principles/patterns/practices, and programming paradigms, in an attempt to find the perfect storm of techniques that will allow corporate IT departments to not only function like startup companies, but also create software that delights users while maintaining a high degree of conceptual integrity. He is currently the product owner for Spring at Pivotal, and spends much of his time driving an active feedback loop between the Spring R&D organization and customers developing cloud-native application architectures.

Matt has spoken at conferences ranging from JavaOne to OSCON to YOW!, is a seven-year member of the No Fluff Just Stuff tour, and serves as Technical Editor of NFJS the Magazine. Matt is also the founder and past president of the Memphis Java User Group.