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Let’s get started with some basic introductions.
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You’ll be able to compare their speed of provisioning, security, usability, ease of replication, and other factors that will help you choose the right technology. This article covers the differences between Vagrant and Docker and explains how they help create consistent development environments. Docker, on the other hand, further abstracts the hardware, operating system, and low-level libraries, creating small, lightweight containers with only the required applications and their necessary runtimes installed. Two technologies- Vagrant and Docker-are particularly popular solutions.įor a quick comparison, Vagrant allows developers to automate spinning up VMs in local workstations from a base image, ensuring all the application-specific libraries and components are always present in the VM no matter what physical machine it’s running on.
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Thanks to an abundance of enterprise-ready open-source applications over the last decade, it’s never been easier to create consistent, disposable development environments.
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Developers have to be able to tear down a development environment and build another one as quickly as possible. And of course, development teams often work on multiple projects at the same time, so they need to keep operating systems and code libraries separate for each project. This in turn requires a fleet of consistent development environments to minimize dependency failures and facilitate system testing. As a result, software engineers must ensure that their local development environments closely resemble the target infrastructure to ensure that code runs smoothly in production. There’s a modern trend for enterprise applications to either be containerized or deployed in virtual machines (VMs).
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