I've been thinking a lot about the "it works on my machine" issue.
We seem to build up and take care of our development environments or virtual machines (VMs). They have a state, mostly a non-deterministic state after being maintained for so long. The idea of spinning up an environment just to test some code would have been infeasible until recently.
I do enjoy using VirtualBox, I've been using it for years. I didn't know that it could be used to automate the deployment of virtual machines. We have developers and devops in the office looking into Docker for this task, but I'm quite comfortable with virtualisation and I thought that I would see if I could use virtualbox (or KVM) for this.
I discovered that Vagrant is a wonderful tool for this automated creation, provisioning and clean up of VMs for development and testing.
I've only used Vagrant for 1 week, but I'm enjoying it so far. My PC at work is fairly old and slow, but even so, I can spin up Ubuntu images in a few minutes, fully provisioned and ready for testing Java code.
I followed the book below to get a head start, it's really good. Using it I created my own CentOS 6 box images.
We seem to build up and take care of our development environments or virtual machines (VMs). They have a state, mostly a non-deterministic state after being maintained for so long. The idea of spinning up an environment just to test some code would have been infeasible until recently.
I do enjoy using VirtualBox, I've been using it for years. I didn't know that it could be used to automate the deployment of virtual machines. We have developers and devops in the office looking into Docker for this task, but I'm quite comfortable with virtualisation and I thought that I would see if I could use virtualbox (or KVM) for this.
I discovered that Vagrant is a wonderful tool for this automated creation, provisioning and clean up of VMs for development and testing.
I've only used Vagrant for 1 week, but I'm enjoying it so far. My PC at work is fairly old and slow, but even so, I can spin up Ubuntu images in a few minutes, fully provisioned and ready for testing Java code.
I followed the book below to get a head start, it's really good. Using it I created my own CentOS 6 box images.
I would really recommend checking out Vagrant and then Docker for creating your testing environments.