The document discusses the challenges of onboarding new team members in a software development environment, particularly regarding the setup of identical development environments and dependency management. It proposes using Vagrant to create virtual machines that contain all necessary tools and libraries, simplifying the onboarding process and resolving the 'works on my machine' issue. This solution allows for consistent development environments that can operate across different operating systems and handle multiple projects with conflicting dependencies.

1. Welcome to
The Perfect World.
How fast you can onboard a new team member

2. • A Weboniser and Rubyist
• A Blogger(vparihar01.github.com)
• A Geek
• DevOps Guy
• An Aspiring Tech Innovator
• Tweet with @vparihar
And Me!

3. Agenda
● Why You Are Doing What You Are Doing?
● What’s Wrong With It?
● What Are My Options ?
● The Future You Ask ?
● Limitations or Known Gotchas?
● Our Take

4. ● You have to develop an awesome application.
● The app is huge, challenging and most importantly cool
● Team of 10 - 15 includes Backend/Frontend Devs, Quality Analysts
etc.,
● You Need Rails , Node.js , Imagemagick , FFmpeg, Ruby Gems ,
MYSQL and even MongoDB.
1. Typical Project Scenario
Why You Are Doing… What You are Doing...

5. 2. Setting up the development environment.
Why You Are Doing… What You are Doing...
● Ideally you’re going to want all 15 people on the team working on this
app to have identical development environments.
● You provide a readme file to each of the developer’s to start setting
up their machines.
● Even on the same team people can have different machine setups
and tool choices (Mac, Linux , Windows ).
● Problem ?

6. Even with a provide full fledge documentation for how to setup
the development environments can be a huge task.
eg: Windows machine yelling WTF is this Imagemagick , people
using Mac asking which is better macports vs homebrew vs fink.
What’s wrong with It?

7. ● How long does it usually take for a
new team member to be ready to
work on your team ?
● What you do now ? Give him/her the
again a readme doc ?
● It might take a day or two or worse
existing team members time is also
wasted in setting up the machine for
him/her.
● Problem again ?
1. New team member on-boarding
What’s wrong with It?

8. 2. Working on Multiple Projects
What’s wrong with It?
● Developers and QA working on different
projects , require different versions of
ruby , libraries , gems etc., installed on
their machine.
● How do you solve that ?

9. ● Wait? Don’t we do that already? Isn’t that what RVM, NPM,MAVEN
and BUNDLER are for?
● They do great things for keeping Ruby versions separate and project
gems in isolation.
● But they do nothing to help with application dependencies like
Oracle, Passenger,Apache ,ImageMagick, Qt(for WebKit) etc., etc
● Problem Again ?
What’s Wrong With It?

10. Expression of a
dev, when asked
to work on a New
Project.

11. Who has not heard
this sentence?
Mostly during bug fixing , It's so common that each dev either it is
FrontEnd / Application Developer they keep saying and yelling at you

12. What Are My
Options ?
●
●
●
●
●
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13. “ C’mon, what is this, two thousand ten? It’s the freakin’
future, man. Instructions for humans are nowhere near as
good as instructions for computers. Humans make mistakes,
misunderstand, and are generally not as fast as computers
when doing this kind of thing. We can tell the computer to do
stuff on our behalf while we watch videos of adorable
animals! ”
-Riley
What’s The Future You Ask ?

14. ● It solves a very huge problem of “works on
my machine” by very common concept, that
is creating your own private VMs(virtual
machines)
● In simple words what I understood from
being a DevOps is taking Snapshot of your
instance or VM.
What’s The Future You Ask ?

15. Those who don't know about Snapshot's, here are some quotes from
Stackoverflow
"Snapshots : An exact capture of what a volume looked like at a
particular moment in time, including all it's data. You could have a
volume, attach it to your instance, fill it up with stuff like Rails , Node.js,
Imagemagick and FFmpeg(video conversion libraries), ruby gems
MySQL etc, then snapshot it, but keep using it.
What’s The Future You Ask ?

16. ● Using Vagrant we can build development environments repeatedly
across Mac OS X, Windows, or Linux.
● A developer’s box kinda becomes this sketchy place where you just
really want to wash your hands after using it.
● Vagrant provides a great way to keep all of that nicely contained, per
project, and away from your precious development machine.
What’s The Future You Ask ?

17. ● The cool thing about Vagrant is that you can create a full dev
environment, with every tool/library required for development already
installed and ready to use.
● Package this up (and the VM's configuration) into a single file that you
can use as a template.
● You have one single file that you distribute to your other team
member and everyone can then use the same environment in couple
of minutes without any hustle :) to build and break.
● New team member on-boarding? No Problem now.
What’s The Future You Ask ?

18. ● If you do it right, you can even leverage your provisioning information
to provision your operational or test systems
● No more hunting down weird dependency problems or debugging.
● Push Vagrant to the limits, it supports the concept of multi-VMs By
using multi-VM support.
● Single vagrant up command, bring up an entire stack of clustered
nodes

19. ● Vagrant interacts with VirtualBox mmm…. It might be the problem.
● If you run the virtual network editor on Windows, the forwarded ports
will suddenly stop working.. Happens sometimes :P
○ Run vagrant reload and things will begin working again.
● In some cases reported Vagrant is slow in Windows Machines….
○ Just Enabling DNS proxy in NAT mode
Limitations or Known Gotchas?

20. By choosing to use Vagrant, our projects and organization gain
some immediate benefits:
● Every developer is now working within identical development
environments. This eliminates a large portion of “works on my
machine” issues.
● No more READMEs per project, or having to ask DevOps for help, or
simply being lost.
Our Take

21. ● Easy nuclear option
● When things go wrong, it can be
really disheartening to reinstall
your operating system.
● Instead put Vagrant to work !
● Take a coffee break and you’ll
be back up and running in no
time.
Our Take

22. ● The development environments are now sandboxed within virtual
machines.
● First, the environments can replicated or run on any machine, it
doesn't matter if it is Linux, Mac OS X, Windows etc.
● Multiple projects with potentially conflicting dependencies can even
run side-by-side.
Our Take

23. Thank You!