More For My Devops Alter Ego

Provisioning

Building servers has been fun. I have built lots, and many different kinds. But I think I have to get back to the development side of things more.

Not yet

But before that, I have to get a bit more efficient at this server building. My fear is that a server might crash or worse, be hacked. I want to have a faster way to restore my servers, as well as more reliable way to code for them between development and production.

Scripts

I have been teaching myself a bit of simple scripting and now feel confident that I can write simple scripts to provision the servers. This could work for me nicely all by itself. But I also want the dev server and the production server to be as much as possible the same environment.

Enter Vagrant

Wow! I am really impressed by vagrant. Now I can set up a dev server in a virtual box in less than two minutes, and feel ensured that it is the same as the production server which I will be building next.

Vagrant lets me control exactly how to provision the server and then repeat it exactly again and again. And do it for my production server. AND I can sync the folders to my dev computer and have them under version control (of course!).

The learning curve wasn’t that steep, and I can even use vagrant to start up the servers directly in the AWS cloud.

It uses Oracle Virtualbox. I use that a few times experimentally before. All I can say is that with vagrant things are so much easier than before. Once I have the set-up, I can start the server with just one command! How nice!

This system is beautiful.

If you haven’t used vagrant, you should.