Vagrant VS Ansible

You can give Vagrant a go (https://www.vagrantup.com). It is pretty handy for spinning up/down development VMs without even leaving your IDE.

Vagrant is a popular tool for launching virtual machines on your local desktop. https://www.vagrantup.com/

And, for the record, if you ever need to do something cross falls down on and Docker isn't suited to (eg. some of my sites are on a shared webhost that uses FreeBSD), the simplest way I've found is to use Vagrant with a script like this to run inside Vagrant to copy the project in, trigger a build, and then copy the binary out.

Have a look at vagrant to spin up VMs quickly, then use 'em to do stuff like configure a salt environment - you could incorporate cron jobs here ;)

I was building a new version of YugabyteDB vagrant box with packer and virtual box. Because we (Yugabyte) have a new preview release out.

I also suggest having a look at Vagrant (https://www.vagrantup.com/) for learning kind of work. It makes running isolated env easy and clean.

Another point to consider is how difficult is it to install the API Gateway or redeploy the gateway when changes are made. Check what installation options are offered. Most modern API Gateways can be installed in many different ways(Package based, Docker, Helm, RPM) in any environment (Linux, Windows, macOS). For example, one of the biggest advantages of Kong is its wide range of installation choices, with pre-made containers such as Docker and Vagrant so you can get a deployment running quickly.

Laravel wanted to make the entire PHP development process as seamless as possible. At the time, Laravel achieved this with Laravel Homestead, apre-packaged Vagrant box. Everything you would need would be bundled into a virtual machine, nice and neat, away from your OS. And this was how I was introduced to Vagrant. A means of packaging virtual machines into a portable format, so you could easily create local development environments. Vagrant worked by using a Vagrantfile to describe the virtual machine you would want to use, how it would be provisioned, the ports you would forward, and the filepaths you would want shared from host to guest. All of these tasks would be handled by the provider, the underlying virtual machine program itself, in my case, VirtualBox. Perhaps the one thing I liked the most about Vagrant, was the ability to provision my machine, clear down if I wanted to and have it back in a clean state for development.

Possibly look at Ansible or SDM

Use Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Use tools such as Terraform, Ansible, or CloudFormation to provision and manage your infrastructure. By using IaC, you can ensure that your API infrastructure is secure from the start and that security policies are enforced consistently.

Ansible-Core ↗ ⚡️

Is it okay to have the documentation in a separate YAML file, as they do in the core filter plugins? Or is it a more modern approach to include it inside the .py file?

More than two years ago the Ansible Docs Working Group started discussing the use of semantic markup for Ansible plugin/module documentation. This resulted in a specification that has been implemented as proofs of concept both for ansible-doc and the validate-modules sanity test, as well as for antsibull-docs. From the docs perspective this will improve plugin, module, and now also role documentation a lot, and in particular separate markup from content. (Right now you have to use C(...) and I(...) for values and option names, which stand for 'code-style' and 'italics'.)

Think the user base for this kind of service is impossibly small? Syncthing has close to 50,000 stars on Github. Ansible, the industry standard automation toolkit, has ~56k stars.

More devs need to know the joy that is Ansible.