What I Know About Vagrant So Far

Owned by Bill Branan
Jun 16, 2017
2 min read

Date

Attendees

Goals

  • Discuss Vagrant and what it offers for streamlining development or devops processes.
  • Discuss other orchestration tools and their potential use for automating the workload of devops.

Summary:

  • Conversation is the order of the day.
  • What does mark know? what do we know?
  • a lot of people use vagrant (~15/23) for virtualization of some kind.
  • DCE works with many different institutions so the abstraction of virtualization processes is important.
  • The stack is very complicated. Virtualization is good for testing / scripting edits, changes so it doesn't need to be done in production.
  • DCE is primarily a Mac shop, so is the majority of the community (by vote of laptop brands at least), so non-apple users contributions to the community is important for other non-apple users' adoption of hydra.
  • Institutions and organizations at hydra use all sorts of virtualization environments, Amazon Web Services, Google Compute Engine, OpenStack, WebSphere, etc.
  • Mark and Alicia have built a lot of VMs on AWS and are working toward a simpler process for building VMs that can deploy to AWS and may other end targets.
  • InfoGraphic - Sections / Layers: Platform, Bootstrap, Hydra Stack, Application - the four areas of deployment.
  • Concerning VMs for Hydra Camp: need to support all sorts of environments. Problems crop up all over trying to get environments up and running for teaching initiatives.
  • Mark showcases his development:
    • Iteration 1: github.com/mark-dce/camper
    • Iteration 2: Mark learned how to use kickstarter files to build their own boxes from scratch (bootstrap layer).
      • Talk of ssh keys for generic users.
      • Included installation steps - virtual box guest additions, etc
  • Configuration manage all the things!
  • The process of using "orchestration management tools" (in this case, vagrant, ansible, and AWS) took DCE's workload from being measured in days (3-4) to being measured in minutes (10-20?).
  • Are the bootstrapped boxes published (somewhere) after the work is complete?
    • Mostly published on thumb drives due to the purpose of Hydra Camp and related issue of network congestion.
    • But they can be published somewhere.
  • DCE uses different versions of files for different targets: local boxes, AWS, VSphere, etc.
  • Kieran's (my) spiel about packer.io - roughly that Packer can take the role of managing those different versions of files for different targets. Works with all major orchestration tools.
  • Connecting to a VM as the vagrant user - problematic when attempting to commit development work.
    • A behavioral solution: use "vagrant" only as a "build" user (should be rare) while manually or as a part of the orchestration tool process adding an ssh key (or keys) for a user (users) who will be committing code from that environment.
    • A possible technological solution:  use https rather than ssh.
  • Having these orchestration tools seems incredibly useful to the present members of the community.
  • Brief conversation about docker - put docker images on "the registry".
    • like ansible galaxy
    • like puppet modules
    • like hashicorp images
  • Is this (the pursuit of researching and implementing orchestration tools) an initiative within the community?
  • Where should information about his initiative live?
  • Possibility of an interest group? Alicia, Kieran (myself), Mark, (someone else behind me I couldn't see).
  • Hydra-in-a-Box community would be very interested in the results of this conversation (id est, Joseph Atzberger)
  • What about huge files and using vagrant?
    • No immediate solution.
  • Next Steps
    • Interest group
    • Documentation for the meeting
    • Be gentle about pull requests.