Re: Suggestions on how to build quick devboxes for testing

Quoting Robert Freiberger ([email protected]):

> Hello,
> 
> I've been pondering this question for a while now. I'll run across a simple
> project where I'll need a simple Linux node built up for testing a package,
> or running through an install before I work on converting it to Puppet.
> 
> For now, I'm using Vagrant, where in most cases my Vagrantfile is very
> simple, aside for setting disk space or memory. But it's not so stable
> which leads me to question if Vagrant is really the best choice for these
> types of tasks.
> 
> Since I'm working with Puppet, our team does not use much testing whereas,
> with Chef, Vagrant was a key component.
> 
> I would really like to hear suggestions and comments, I have thought about
> using a standard Linux image, and configuring this with Ansible or a local
> Puppet file to somewhat get the same thing as Vagrant.

Hi, Robert.  I hope others will pitch in with better
suggestions/comments than mine.  I've actually not worked to date with
Vagrant, only (at a couple of firms) with Jenkins, and to be honest I'd 
often wondered if my departments shouldn't migrate to Vagrant.  ;->

Jenkins is a continuous-integration tool written in Java for servlet
engines (e.g., Tomcat), and as such is just a bit ponderous.  It's a
general-purpose automation engine in a sense, but most often used for
triggering automated builds of various sorts.  At my most recent $FIRM,
we used it to autolaunch and configure Amazon EC2 instances, and it can
do the sort of thing you've been using Vagrant for.  

At the previous firm, we used Jenkins for quality-testing code pushes
from Puppet, and it worked well enough.

You say Vagrant has had a stability problem in your deployment?  That's
a little disturbing.

I'm betting that most of the alternatives you'll see mentioned widely
are pretty enterprise-oriented big projects, like the Kubernetes
container-orchestration package.  I note that the invitable Wikipedia
comparison page exists for continuous-integration toolkits:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_continuous_integration_software
(Those aren't quite te same as VM provisioning tools, but there's some
overlap between the categories.)

Maybe what you should do is make Puppet build the VM (including your
package), and some scripts you write that Puppet provides do the
testing.  _Or_, sit down and figure out what's causing your Vagrant
stability problems, which frankly I find surprising (albeit without
background in that software other than reading about it).

Best of fortune, anyway.



> Thanks again for your help!
> Robert
> 
> -- 
> Robert Freiberger
> 510-936-1210

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