Hands-On DevOps with Vagrant: Implement end-to-end DevOps and infrastructure management using Vagrant

Vagrant is very simple on the surface, but is actually incredibly complex under the hood. It allows you to quickly and effortlessly create virtual environments (known as Vagrant boxes) and customize them. Vagrant easily integrates with multiple providers, such as VirtualBox, VMware, and Docker. These providers actually power the virtual environments, but Vagrant provides a customizable API to that virtual machine.

Vagrant has a large selection of commands, which can be used from the command line/Terminal to manage virtual environments. These commands can quickly download and set up an environment from the Vagrant cloud, which hosts many popular environments, such as Ubuntu or PHP's Laravel.

Vagrant is an important piece of software that can be found in many programmers' toolboxes. It is commonly used to tackle the well-known phrase, It works on my machine, by allowing everyone to have a copy of the same environment.

Vagrant was created by Mitchell Hashimoto and released in March 2010. Vagrant is now part of the HashiCorp company, which Mitchell Hashimoto cofounded in 2012 with Armon Dadgar. Vagrant is an open source piece of software that has been built in the Ruby language. It is currently being licensed under the MIT license. Vagrant can be run on macOS, Windows, FreeBSD, and Linux.

Vagrant is essentially another layer in the virtualization stack. It acts as an easily programmable interface to control virtual environments. Vagrant relies on a provider, such as VirtualBox, to power these environments, but it can also configure providers so they work in harmony – an example would be Vagrant controlling how much memory (RAM) an environment has.

Vagrant allows you to easily package up a virtual environment that can be shared among fellow developers. This packaged virtual environment is often referred to as a Vagrant box. A box can be configured to mirror the production environment where your web application or code will be running. This can help minimize any bugs or issues when your application/code is deployed to the production environment.

The beauty of Vagrant's configuration (known as a Vagrantfile) is often small and can be easily edited and tested. The syntax of a Vagrantfile is easy to understand and offers a simple way to build a complex environment.

Vagrant can be used by many different members of a team, including those on the development team, the operations team, and the design team. 

VirtualBox is one of the many providers that Vagrant supports. VirtualBox is a powerful virtualization tool that allows you to create virtual environments on your existing operating system. It allows you to fully customize a virtual machine's hardware, such as the RAM, CPU, hard drive, audio, and graphics.

VirtualBox was initially released in January 2007 by the company Innotek GmbH, which was later acquired by Sun Microsystems, which, in turn, was acquired by the Oracle Corporation. Oracle is actively maintaining and releasing new versions of VirtualBox.

VirtualBox is built in x86 Assembly, C++, and C. It can run and supports many different operating systems, such as Windows, Linux, Solaris, and OS X.

DevOps is a popular term in the IT world at the moment. There are many different opinions as to what DevOps actually is. In simple terms, DevOps is the mix of development and operations. It is essentially creating a sort of "hybrid programmer" who knows about operations and infrastructure, or a system admin who understands programming and can develop applications.

DevOps is a mixture of methodologies, practices, philosophies, and software. DevOps streamlines the whole project life cycle by creating a workflow that works for all departments. There are no rules or laws in DevOps, but generally it's the process of connecting the developers and the infrastructure team by enabling an easy way to develop and ship code.

The beauty of DevOps is that any company can start following its ideas, methodologies, and best practices. Large companies may have a whole DevOps department/team, whereas smaller companies may just need one or two dedicated DevOps employees. In a start-up scenario, where money must be carefully budgeted, one employee may take on the role of developer and also DevOps.

As mentioned previously, DevOps is a mixture of software development, operations/system administration, and testing/quality assurance. DevOps is not a new movement, but one that doesn't necessarily have a leader or a set of rules and standards to follow. Every company has their own idea of what DevOps is and how it should be implemented. Many follow similar paths or rough guidelines. Due to the lack of governance with DevOps, the current state of development is varied.

Traditionally, development has always been separate to the operations and server team, but in the last few years, we have seen many DevOps tools bridge that gap and make life easier for both sides.

In the past, when a web developer would build a web application, they would code it, built it locally on their machine, and then FTP (file transfer) the files onto a live (production) server to then run the code—if there were any issues or bugs, the developer would have to make changes to the server environment and debug the code. There are many developers who still use this workflow and it may be because of their environment or because they have no choice in the matter.

Today, a modern web developer's workflow may look like this:

Of course, this is just an example workflow and will differ between companies and development teams. The modern workflow may seem much more complicated and tedious, but this is for good measure. At each stage, you'll notice there are checks and tests run before the code can reach a live production environment where real users may be interacting with that code. This can be incredibly important when working with financial software and other business-critical software. This modern workflow greatly reduces the margin of error.

Modern development in the DevOps world is focused on speed and automation. The focus on speed is the ability to quickly build a feature or fix a bug and "push the code to production" (a phrase you might have heard!). This means that single developers or a team of developers have less of a barrier when working on the code. A developer shouldn't worry about configuring servers or environments.

Automation is a big part of DevOps, and that effects the development part too. You can imagine how slow a process it would be if a developer made changes to their code and then had to wait for a member of the operations team to manually run tests and scripts against their changes before letting them know the result. 

I believe that Vagrant is a key tool in a developer's toolbox in today's DevOps-focused world. Vagrant is essentially a suite of tools that allows the developer to create code but also connect with configuration management tools, such as Puppet, Chef, and Ansible, that are used to automate workflows and environments on servers.

Vagrant's primary focus is on development and enables an easy way for every developer on the team to use the same environment. Within a Vagrant environment, you can run version-control that could link into the CI workflow, which allows you to run tests and move code into different stages.

Vagrant is a flexible tool that enhances day-to-day development by allowing you to easily test out DevOps workflow ideas. It allows you to separate your software code and infrastructure without having to know much about DevOps, infrastructure, servers, and configuration-management tools. 

As a day-to-day DevOps tool, Vagrant can be used for many things, including the following: