Virtual machines allow developers to isolate their projects and their dependencies to avoid conflicts between different projects. They provide a consistent environment that is shareable and portable across different machines. Vagrant and Docker are two common tools for setting up virtual machines. While both tools create isolated virtual environments, Docker uses smaller incremental images and makes it easier to set up multi-machine environments compared to Vagrant. Ultimately, virtual machines could help standardize development environments and minimize setup times by allowing developers to use identical environments locally and in production.

1. Virtualisation
I don’t know much about it,
but I know enough to think it’s
the future of web development.

2. The Problem
… Even if you do find documentation, it’s inaccurate, out of date, and
incomplete. You copy some files here and there. You install a
programming language or two. You run a random shell script. You
fiddle with environment variables. [...] of course, some of the
requirements from one project conflict with the requirements of
another project. Before you know it, you’re spending hours reading
about RVM and RBEnv so you can run multiple versions of Ruby,
you’re fighting with strange errors with C header files…
“
”Yevgeniy (Jim) Brikman - Atomic Squirrel

3. Wouldn’t it be better to take a snapshot of the machine?

4. A couple of solutions are:

5. In 30 seconds...
Virtual machines are like emulators:
● Mirror your Live environment
● Isolated from host machine
● Shareable
● Cross-platform

6. Vagrant Docker
What’s the difference?

7. How does it all work?

8. How Vagrant works
● Compressed file system archive (Box file)
● Text-based configuration file (Vagrantfile)
● Vagrant CLI
● Pre-built Box file library

9. How Docker works
● Partial file system archives (Images)
● Text-based configuration file (Dockerfile)
● Docker CLI, Docker Compose CLI
● Container Repository

10. Caveat Emptor

11. Caveat Emptor

12. Similarities
● Virtual machines running in VMware
● Can easily mean working with huge binary files
● Multiple machines with networking
● Local and remote environments
● Existing repositories of starter images

13. Differences
● Docker uses incremental images in builds
● Multi-machine setup in Docker is easier
● Docker advises it is ‘Not Production ready’

14. Which is better?
xkcd.com

15. Vagrant example .

16. Docker example .

17. Where can Virtual Machines take us?

18. What VMs could mean
● Death to ‘It works on my machine’
● Say ‘No!’ to intangible dependencies
● Banish the OS incompatibilities
● Minimise setup and onboarding times

19. The Moon Shot
● The same Virtual Machine images in use on
Local, Dev, Live and everything in-between
● Scalable Solution

20. Questions?