Spreading the Word on Vagrant and Ansible
Over the last two months I have presented the advantages of using Vagrant and Ansible to the PHP melbourne and Melbourne Linux user groups and on both occasions it was well received. I demonstrated how development environments can be automated for teams to ensure that everyone is running the same software and at the same versions.
Getting development environments up and running for your current project can very time consuming on some occasions hard to debug when things are behaving strangely. If you have several developers running environments of Windows, Mac and Linux, getting each developer’s rig set to start work can be unnecessarily difficult. With Vagrant and Ansible, one person can easily script the configuration, allowing others to just run it to get the environment setup.
When talking with the Linux group I focused the talk about Ansible more on deploying to production servers (web, mail, etc..) which has no real need for Vagrant. However Vagrant is helpful here also because it allows you to test your Ansible scripts locally before deploying to production systems, saving time and money.
Just a 20 minute presentation is enough to give some examples and a live demonstration to show how easy it is to implement and why they should look at using these technologies in their own work.
My slides are available here and the working script is available on Github.