Vagrant is awesome as part of a development workflow.

It allows you to leverage virtualization to create automated, repeatable environments. If you find yourself doing the same bootstrapping/deployments often, you’re probably using shell scripts or configuration management tools like Puppet or Chef already.

That’s great, but that doesn’t take care of actually creating/installing your server - and that’s where Vagrant comes in the picture.

Oh, and you get to keep your current shell scripts or other configuration means because once Vagrant is done creating your server, it can launch them.

Vagrant providers

By default, Vagrant comes bundled with Virtualbox support. Using Vagrant with Virtualbox is easy enough, especially with the bunch of boxes available.

Vagrant also has other providers built-in such as Docker, VMWare or even Hyper-V.

To have Openstack support, we have to go beyond what Vagrant officially supports with vagrant-openstack.

vagrant-openstack

I would usually go on with examples on how to use it but vagrant-openstack is in fact pretty well documented already.

I use it on a regular basis, it’s great when you have a LOT of servers and you don’t want/need them running them locally. Offload development environments to a private cloud instead of on my laptop ?

Sign me up.