Lessons from virtualising local development environments

its complicated

While working at ANDigital we used multiple languages/frameworks/web servers for both internal projects and external client work. Our goal was to be able to continuously deploy each of the services that we were involved with. I came to the conclusion that scripted virtualisation for local development put us on the right track to achieving this goal. The below outlines my learning from getting this process working.

Vagrant wrapped VirtualBox for local virtualisation

Vagrant is a handy wrapper for VirtualBox which allows you to programmatically setup underlying OS, mapped drives and define provisioning scripts. It also configures your local networking so you can see it as localhost. This can be checked into to your source control for ease of distribution as well as inbuilt change control.

Ansible for provisioning

Ansible is a configuration management tool that connects via SSH and programatically runs scripts for you. You use a simple language to define what each step will do and has default helpers for a lot of different tools such as Docker. The great thing about Ansible is that you can use it for both provisioning of servers and deployment of code. This is also checked in to a repository for distribution and change control.

Same scripts locally and at all stages

The advantage of using Ansible is that you can utilise very similar scripts for provisioning across every environment. The task based approach allows you to construct subtle differences but increases confidence of consistency. Automation of deployment also helps ensure that from your local environment through each stage that code lives in the same places executed in the same way.

Package, build and tests management

Ensuring that your development machine has the correct versions of packages, build and test tools can be quite a challenge. Especially when working on multiple projects with subtle differences. Having a script that configures these takes away a lot of the upfront setup and ensures you are running the same versions as your continuous integration servers.

It works on my machine

This is a such a common cry from developers and something we are slowly moving away from. As our local servers run a VM which is almost identical to development and production testing locally is much more realistic. It also forces developers to consider that there code will be running on a server. This is an important mindset that helps move away from this issue.

My IDE does that for me

The main pushback I have encountered is from people using a fully fledged IDE which contains a web server. I think that these two approaches can work in tandem which a push to your local server before checking code in as an extra step. I have also put an IDE within the server for an even higher level of consistency.

Cost and productivity boosts

The quicker that you can find a problem the easier and cheaper it is to solve. The lack of context switching required as you are awaiting feedback from test and regression is also a real bonus.

No longer can it be the operations teams responsibility to push code to production, developers should comprehend the impact that their code makes on all environments and local virtualisation really helps this mindset. Being able to switch between different environments with a simple vagrant up is definitely a future I want to be part of.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *