Vagrant VS Packer

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.

Packer is a tool that can be used to build machine images. Basically, it takes a base image, runs a series of steps to provision that image, and then burns a new image. In my workplace we use it heavily to build AWS AMIs. But it has an ARM plugin that looks to be very very suitable for building customised Raspberry Pi images (my quick read of the doco there says it can go ahead and write the final image to an SD card for you too).

However, I was unable to build the boxes with packer for some reason. It turned out that this wasn't an easy to fix or obvious issue. In fact, I had to search quite hard to find an answer. I am pretty sure my friend Tim Hall (oracle-base) ran into this issue too. Finally, I found a description of the issue on packer GitHub: Packer 1.8.4 not working with Virtualbox 7.0.4+ #12118.

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

Packer. https://github.com/hashicorp/packer

For an AMI build pipeline, have a look at Hashicorp Packer and Ansible if a host is long lived

Heh, I've been messing more with Nomad & Packer than k8s for my own stuff, I'll say guilty for Ansible though it's useful on its own and with Packer.

Sounds reasonable. Personally, I just try to stay away from k8s until it becomes a requirement. Until then simplest tools are often a good choice for building systems that require less maintenance. That's a per-project decision though.

You do not need Ansible for VMs provisioning - you can bake a VM image that will pull repos and do other preparation stuff. HashiCorp Packer[1] is an good tool for this imo. This applies to bare metal, too, as you can bake ISO or IMG the same way. Stuff that differentiate those systems can be set up with cloud-init or something similar.

Regarding Ansible, it didn't changed much over the years. At least nothing really major like statefulness.

[1] https://www.packer.io/

Oooh, maybe I'll try it with packer or Foreman (or MaaS, I'm actually setting up MaaS atm...)