GoKawiil13 min read
Goodbye, old friend. We’ve been traveling together since 2010, and you’ve faithfully served all my virtual machine needs well, first with VirtualBox and then later with libvirt and KVM. But, as they1 say, all good things must pass.
What happened? What has changed?
Introduction
So, what are we doing here? Why are we parting ways? Honestly, I have found that Vagrant is just too much software for little old me. As I continue my learning journey throughout this wee life and become exposed to more and more things, I question and re-evaluate some of my earlier choices when I didn’t know as much as I do now. I’ve always revisited past project and decisions, and this has served me well. In this case, I saw that I was making my workflow too complex.
When I first started using Vagrant in 2010, I was content just to have it manage the lifecycle of my VMs. Vagrant boxes were cool and saved me time, and then later on as I started using Ansible, I started provisioning my machines with Vagrant’s builtin Ansible support.
But as I continued learning more and more about Linux, I started wondering why I just didn’t use KVM instead of Vagrant. After all, it’s been merged into the Linux kernel since version 2.6.20, so I already have the tools I need to create and manage virtual machines. Why have another software layer, another abstraction, to create something that Linux can do natively?
I started feeling like a weenie. I began feeling like a smelly little turd. Worst of all, I realized that I was being lazy. So, I switched from the VirtualBox provider to the libvirt provider as a half-measure several years ago and moved on with my life. After all, I had much more important things to do, such as working as very hard as I very could for my then-employer and their customers, since they told me that that was the important thing, the most important thing, so important that I should get up at 3am on consecutive nights to fix hasty infrastructure that we weren’t given time to fix during the work week because Agile and because Scrum master and because it didn’t provide value to the customer.
Anyway, after a couple of years of this shameful behavior, I finally set aside time to dig into KVM and libvirt and do it right. That’s right, children, I uninstalled Vagrant2 and my wife started to love me again.
So, what did I do? Come, join me around the fire, and let’s all learn together.
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