pycon2015/virtualization.md

The Landscape

• "You will need a few days to get a development environment set up and working."
• "We added a new service; we should really document that."
• "Are you sure you're running the same version of Python?"
• "It works on my machine!"

That's not how things should be; we should fix it.

What Do We Want?

Dev environments that

• mirror production as much as possible
• are low-cost
• are disposable
• don't suck to develop on

Why?

• portability -- for new hire: a setup that just works

• consistency

• reusability

• Vagrant == most popular tool

  • wraps around other tools: VMWare, virtualbox etc.

Provisioning tools

• Ansible

• Chef

• Docker

• Puppet

• SaltStack

• tell Vagrant in provisioning that this VM is a development box

Advantages of virtualization

• different amounts of RAM
• different OSs
• vagrant share allows you to share your box with others