Vagrant & Puppet: Deploying Development Environments ... Fast

Building (and re-building … and re-building) test and development environments can be time-consuming and painful. These environments are subject to rapid change, usually have limited management and are on the critical path for getting your code from idea to product. Naturally they frequently break. And when they break they stop developers and testers doing their jobs and consume lots of SysAdmin time fixing them. Time better spent at the pub.

All is not lost though. I’m going to show you a new way to build and manage these environments using two open source tools:

• Vagrant, a tool for building and distributing virtualized development environments, and
• Puppet, a configuration management tool that helps you get to the pub sooner.

You’ll learn how to:

• Install, build and deploy Vagrant-enabled virtual machines
• How to configure and manage these virtual machines with Puppet, and
• Quickly and easily recreate and rebuild them if they break

I’ll also discuss how all of this fits into a continuous deployment methodology and introduce some simple workflows that will allow you to ensure your development, testing and production deployment environments remain consistent and coherent.