Alternatives to boot2docker logo

Alternatives to boot2docker

Docker Machine, Photon, Ubuntu, Docker, and RancherOS are the most popular alternatives and competitors to boot2docker.
275
210
+ 1
95

What is boot2docker and what are its top alternatives?

boot2docker is a lightweight Linux distribution based on Tiny Core Linux made specifically to run Docker containers. It runs completely from RAM, weighs ~27MB and boots in ~5s (YMMV).
boot2docker is a tool in the Virtual Machine Management category of a tech stack.
boot2docker is an open source tool with 8.3K GitHub stars and 1.3K GitHub forks. Here’s a link to boot2docker's open source repository on GitHub

Top Alternatives to boot2docker

  • Docker Machine
    Docker Machine

    Machine lets you create Docker hosts on your computer, on cloud providers, and inside your own data center. It creates servers, installs Docker on them, then configures the Docker client to talk to them. ...

  • Photon
    Photon

    The fastest way to build beautiful Electron apps using simple HTML and CSS. Underneath it all is Electron. Originally built for GitHub's Atom text editor, Electron is the easiest way to build cross-platform desktop applications. ...

  • Ubuntu
    Ubuntu

    Ubuntu is an ancient African word meaning ‘humanity to others’. It also means ‘I am what I am because of who we all are’. The Ubuntu operating system brings the spirit of Ubuntu to the world of computers. ...

  • Docker
    Docker

    The Docker Platform is the industry-leading container platform for continuous, high-velocity innovation, enabling organizations to seamlessly build and share any application — from legacy to what comes next — and securely run them anywhere ...

  • RancherOS
    RancherOS

    It makes it simple to run containers at scale in development, test and production. By containerizing system services and leveraging Docker for management, the operating system provides a very reliable and easy to manage containers. ...

  • CoreOS
    CoreOS

    It is designed for security, consistency, and reliability. Instead of installing packages via yum or apt, it uses Linux containers to manage your services at a higher level of abstraction. A single service's code and all dependencies are packaged within a container that can be run on one or many machines. ...

  • VirtualBox
    VirtualBox

    VirtualBox is a powerful x86 and AMD64/Intel64 virtualization product for enterprise as well as home use. Not only is VirtualBox an extremely feature rich, high performance product for enterprise customers, it is also the only professional solution that is freely available as Open Source Software under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL) version 2. ...

  • Vagrant
    Vagrant

    Vagrant provides the framework and configuration format to create and manage complete portable development environments. These development environments can live on your computer or in the cloud, and are portable between Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. ...

boot2docker alternatives & related posts

Docker Machine logo

Docker Machine

434
516
12
Machine management for a container-centric world
434
516
+ 1
12
PROS OF DOCKER MACHINE
  • 12
    Easy docker hosts management
CONS OF DOCKER MACHINE
    Be the first to leave a con

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    Photon logo

    Photon

    30
    88
    0
    Framework for Electron apps
    30
    88
    + 1
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      Be the first to leave a pro
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        Ubuntu logo

        Ubuntu

        77.6K
        56.5K
        468
        The leading OS for PC, tablet, phone and cloud
        77.6K
        56.5K
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        PROS OF UBUNTU
        • 230
          Free to use
        • 96
          Easy setup for testing discord bot
        • 57
          Gateway Linux Distro
        • 54
          Simple interface
        • 9
          Don't need driver installation in most cases
        • 6
          Open Source
        • 6
          Many active communities
        • 3
          Software Availability
        • 3
          Easy to custom
        • 2
          Many flavors/distros based on ubuntu
        • 1
          Lightweight container base OS
        • 1
          Great OotB Linux Shell Experience
        CONS OF UBUNTU
        • 5
          Demanding system requirements
        • 4
          Adds overhead and unnecessary complexity over Debian
        • 2
          Snapd installed by default
        • 1
          Systemd

        related Ubuntu posts

        Tim Abbott
        Shared insights
        on
        DebianDebianUbuntuUbuntuFedoraFedora
        at

        We use Debian and its derivative Ubuntu because the apt ecosystem and toolchain for Debian packages is far superior to the yum-based system used by Fedora and RHEL. This is large part due to a huge amount of investment into tools like debhelper/dh over the years by the Debian community. I haven't dealt with RPM in the last couple years, but every experience I've had with RPM is that the RPM tools are slower, have less useful options, and it's more work to package software for them (and one makes more compromises in doing so).

        I think everyone has seen the better experience using Ubuntu in the shift of prevalence from RHEL to Ubuntu in what most new companies are deploying on their servers, and I expect that trend to continue as long as Red Hat is using the RPM system (and I don't really see them as having a path to migrate).

        The experience with Ubuntu and Debian stable releases is pretty similar: A solid release every 2 years that's supported for a few years. (While Ubuntu in theory releases every 6 months, their non-LTS releases are effectively betas: They're often unstable, only have 9 months of support, etc. I wouldn't recommend them to anyone not actively participating in Ubuntu the development community). Ubuntu has better integration of non-free drivers, which may be important if you have hardware that requires them. But it's also the case that most bugs I experience when using Ubuntu are Ubuntu-specific issues, especially on servers (in part because Ubuntu has a bunch of "cloud management" stuff pre-installed that is definitely a regression if you're not using Canonical's cloud management products).

        See more
        John Calandra
        Data Manager at The Garrett Group · | 8 upvotes · 354.6K views

        There is a question coming... I am using Oracle VirtualBox to spawn 3 Ubuntu Linux virtual machines (VM). VM1 is being used as a data lake - just a place to store flat files. VM2 hosts Apache NiFi. VM3 hosts PostgreSQL. I have built a NiFi pipeline that reads flat files on VM1 and then pipes the data over to and inserts it into the Postgresql database. I left this setup alone for a while, and then something hiccupped on VM3, and I had to rebuild it. Now I cannot make a remote connection to Postgresql on VM3. I was using pgAdmin3 on VM3, but it kept throwing errors - I found out it went end-of-life in 2018 and uninstalled it. pgAdmin4 is out, but for some reason, I cannot get the APT utility to find/install it. I am trying to figure out the pgAdmin4 install problem and looking for a good alternative for pgAdmin4 that I can use to diagnose the remote database connection problem. Does anyone have any suggestions? Thanks in advance.

        See more
        Docker logo

        Docker

        184.8K
        136K
        3.9K
        Enterprise Container Platform for High-Velocity Innovation.
        184.8K
        136K
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        3.9K
        PROS OF DOCKER
        • 823
          Rapid integration and build up
        • 691
          Isolation
        • 521
          Open source
        • 505
          Testa­bil­i­ty and re­pro­ducibil­i­ty
        • 460
          Lightweight
        • 218
          Standardization
        • 185
          Scalable
        • 106
          Upgrading / down­grad­ing / ap­pli­ca­tion versions
        • 88
          Security
        • 85
          Private paas environments
        • 34
          Portability
        • 26
          Limit resource usage
        • 17
          Game changer
        • 16
          I love the way docker has changed virtualization
        • 14
          Fast
        • 12
          Concurrency
        • 8
          Docker's Compose tools
        • 6
          Easy setup
        • 6
          Fast and Portable
        • 5
          Because its fun
        • 4
          Makes shipping to production very simple
        • 3
          Highly useful
        • 3
          It's dope
        • 2
          Very easy to setup integrate and build
        • 2
          HIgh Throughput
        • 2
          Package the environment with the application
        • 2
          Does a nice job hogging memory
        • 2
          Open source and highly configurable
        • 2
          Simplicity, isolation, resource effective
        • 2
          MacOS support FAKE
        • 2
          Its cool
        • 2
          Docker hub for the FTW
        • 2
          Super
        • 0
          Asdfd
        CONS OF DOCKER
        • 8
          New versions == broken features
        • 6
          Unreliable networking
        • 6
          Documentation not always in sync
        • 4
          Moves quickly
        • 3
          Not Secure

        related Docker posts

        Simon Reymann
        Senior Fullstack Developer at QUANTUSflow Software GmbH · | 30 upvotes · 8.9M views

        Our whole DevOps stack consists of the following tools:

        • GitHub (incl. GitHub Pages/Markdown for Documentation, GettingStarted and HowTo's) for collaborative review and code management tool
        • Respectively Git as revision control system
        • SourceTree as Git GUI
        • Visual Studio Code as IDE
        • CircleCI for continuous integration (automatize development process)
        • Prettier / TSLint / ESLint as code linter
        • SonarQube as quality gate
        • Docker as container management (incl. Docker Compose for multi-container application management)
        • VirtualBox for operating system simulation tests
        • Kubernetes as cluster management for docker containers
        • Heroku for deploying in test environments
        • nginx as web server (preferably used as facade server in production environment)
        • SSLMate (using OpenSSL) for certificate management
        • Amazon EC2 (incl. Amazon S3) for deploying in stage (production-like) and production environments
        • PostgreSQL as preferred database system
        • Redis as preferred in-memory database/store (great for caching)

        The main reason we have chosen Kubernetes over Docker Swarm is related to the following artifacts:

        • Key features: Easy and flexible installation, Clear dashboard, Great scaling operations, Monitoring is an integral part, Great load balancing concepts, Monitors the condition and ensures compensation in the event of failure.
        • Applications: An application can be deployed using a combination of pods, deployments, and services (or micro-services).
        • Functionality: Kubernetes as a complex installation and setup process, but it not as limited as Docker Swarm.
        • Monitoring: It supports multiple versions of logging and monitoring when the services are deployed within the cluster (Elasticsearch/Kibana (ELK), Heapster/Grafana, Sysdig cloud integration).
        • Scalability: All-in-one framework for distributed systems.
        • Other Benefits: Kubernetes is backed by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), huge community among container orchestration tools, it is an open source and modular tool that works with any OS.
        See more
        Tymoteusz Paul
        Devops guy at X20X Development LTD · | 23 upvotes · 8M views

        Often enough I have to explain my way of going about setting up a CI/CD pipeline with multiple deployment platforms. Since I am a bit tired of yapping the same every single time, I've decided to write it up and share with the world this way, and send people to read it instead ;). I will explain it on "live-example" of how the Rome got built, basing that current methodology exists only of readme.md and wishes of good luck (as it usually is ;)).

        It always starts with an app, whatever it may be and reading the readmes available while Vagrant and VirtualBox is installing and updating. Following that is the first hurdle to go over - convert all the instruction/scripts into Ansible playbook(s), and only stopping when doing a clear vagrant up or vagrant reload we will have a fully working environment. As our Vagrant environment is now functional, it's time to break it! This is the moment to look for how things can be done better (too rigid/too lose versioning? Sloppy environment setup?) and replace them with the right way to do stuff, one that won't bite us in the backside. This is the point, and the best opportunity, to upcycle the existing way of doing dev environment to produce a proper, production-grade product.

        I should probably digress here for a moment and explain why. I firmly believe that the way you deploy production is the same way you should deploy develop, shy of few debugging-friendly setting. This way you avoid the discrepancy between how production work vs how development works, which almost always causes major pains in the back of the neck, and with use of proper tools should mean no more work for the developers. That's why we start with Vagrant as developer boxes should be as easy as vagrant up, but the meat of our product lies in Ansible which will do meat of the work and can be applied to almost anything: AWS, bare metal, docker, LXC, in open net, behind vpn - you name it.

        We must also give proper consideration to monitoring and logging hoovering at this point. My generic answer here is to grab Elasticsearch, Kibana, and Logstash. While for different use cases there may be better solutions, this one is well battle-tested, performs reasonably and is very easy to scale both vertically (within some limits) and horizontally. Logstash rules are easy to write and are well supported in maintenance through Ansible, which as I've mentioned earlier, are at the very core of things, and creating triggers/reports and alerts based on Elastic and Kibana is generally a breeze, including some quite complex aggregations.

        If we are happy with the state of the Ansible it's time to move on and put all those roles and playbooks to work. Namely, we need something to manage our CI/CD pipelines. For me, the choice is obvious: TeamCity. It's modern, robust and unlike most of the light-weight alternatives, it's transparent. What I mean by that is that it doesn't tell you how to do things, doesn't limit your ways to deploy, or test, or package for that matter. Instead, it provides a developer-friendly and rich playground for your pipelines. You can do most the same with Jenkins, but it has a quite dated look and feel to it, while also missing some key functionality that must be brought in via plugins (like quality REST API which comes built-in with TeamCity). It also comes with all the common-handy plugins like Slack or Apache Maven integration.

        The exact flow between CI and CD varies too greatly from one application to another to describe, so I will outline a few rules that guide me in it: 1. Make build steps as small as possible. This way when something breaks, we know exactly where, without needing to dig and root around. 2. All security credentials besides development environment must be sources from individual Vault instances. Keys to those containers should exist only on the CI/CD box and accessible by a few people (the less the better). This is pretty self-explanatory, as anything besides dev may contain sensitive data and, at times, be public-facing. Because of that appropriate security must be present. TeamCity shines in this department with excellent secrets-management. 3. Every part of the build chain shall consume and produce artifacts. If it creates nothing, it likely shouldn't be its own build. This way if any issue shows up with any environment or version, all developer has to do it is grab appropriate artifacts to reproduce the issue locally. 4. Deployment builds should be directly tied to specific Git branches/tags. This enables much easier tracking of what caused an issue, including automated identifying and tagging the author (nothing like automated regression testing!).

        Speaking of deployments, I generally try to keep it simple but also with a close eye on the wallet. Because of that, I am more than happy with AWS or another cloud provider, but also constantly peeking at the loads and do we get the value of what we are paying for. Often enough the pattern of use is not constantly erratic, but rather has a firm baseline which could be migrated away from the cloud and into bare metal boxes. That is another part where this approach strongly triumphs over the common Docker and CircleCI setup, where you are very much tied in to use cloud providers and getting out is expensive. Here to embrace bare-metal hosting all you need is a help of some container-based self-hosting software, my personal preference is with Proxmox and LXC. Following that all you must write are ansible scripts to manage hardware of Proxmox, similar way as you do for Amazon EC2 (ansible supports both greatly) and you are good to go. One does not exclude another, quite the opposite, as they can live in great synergy and cut your costs dramatically (the heavier your base load, the bigger the savings) while providing production-grade resiliency.

        See more
        RancherOS logo

        RancherOS

        106
        158
        3
        A Lightweight Container Operating System
        106
        158
        + 1
        3
        PROS OF RANCHEROS
        • 3
          System-docker
        CONS OF RANCHEROS
          Be the first to leave a con

          related RancherOS posts

          CoreOS logo

          CoreOS

          225
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          Linux for Massive Server Deployments
          225
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          + 1
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          PROS OF COREOS
          • 20
            Container management
          • 15
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          • 9
            Systemd
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            End-of-lifed

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          VirtualBox logo

          VirtualBox

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          PROS OF VIRTUALBOX
          • 358
            Free
          • 231
            Easy
          • 169
            Default for vagrant
          • 110
            Fast
          • 73
            Starts quickly
          • 45
            Open-source
          • 42
            Running in background
          • 41
            Simple, yet comprehensive
          • 27
            Default for boot2docker
          • 22
            Extensive customization
          • 3
            Free to use
          • 2
            Mouse integration
          • 2
            Easy tool
          • 2
            Cross-platform
          CONS OF VIRTUALBOX
            Be the first to leave a con

            related VirtualBox posts

            Simon Reymann
            Senior Fullstack Developer at QUANTUSflow Software GmbH · | 30 upvotes · 8.9M views

            Our whole DevOps stack consists of the following tools:

            • GitHub (incl. GitHub Pages/Markdown for Documentation, GettingStarted and HowTo's) for collaborative review and code management tool
            • Respectively Git as revision control system
            • SourceTree as Git GUI
            • Visual Studio Code as IDE
            • CircleCI for continuous integration (automatize development process)
            • Prettier / TSLint / ESLint as code linter
            • SonarQube as quality gate
            • Docker as container management (incl. Docker Compose for multi-container application management)
            • VirtualBox for operating system simulation tests
            • Kubernetes as cluster management for docker containers
            • Heroku for deploying in test environments
            • nginx as web server (preferably used as facade server in production environment)
            • SSLMate (using OpenSSL) for certificate management
            • Amazon EC2 (incl. Amazon S3) for deploying in stage (production-like) and production environments
            • PostgreSQL as preferred database system
            • Redis as preferred in-memory database/store (great for caching)

            The main reason we have chosen Kubernetes over Docker Swarm is related to the following artifacts:

            • Key features: Easy and flexible installation, Clear dashboard, Great scaling operations, Monitoring is an integral part, Great load balancing concepts, Monitors the condition and ensures compensation in the event of failure.
            • Applications: An application can be deployed using a combination of pods, deployments, and services (or micro-services).
            • Functionality: Kubernetes as a complex installation and setup process, but it not as limited as Docker Swarm.
            • Monitoring: It supports multiple versions of logging and monitoring when the services are deployed within the cluster (Elasticsearch/Kibana (ELK), Heapster/Grafana, Sysdig cloud integration).
            • Scalability: All-in-one framework for distributed systems.
            • Other Benefits: Kubernetes is backed by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), huge community among container orchestration tools, it is an open source and modular tool that works with any OS.
            See more
            Tymoteusz Paul
            Devops guy at X20X Development LTD · | 23 upvotes · 8M views

            Often enough I have to explain my way of going about setting up a CI/CD pipeline with multiple deployment platforms. Since I am a bit tired of yapping the same every single time, I've decided to write it up and share with the world this way, and send people to read it instead ;). I will explain it on "live-example" of how the Rome got built, basing that current methodology exists only of readme.md and wishes of good luck (as it usually is ;)).

            It always starts with an app, whatever it may be and reading the readmes available while Vagrant and VirtualBox is installing and updating. Following that is the first hurdle to go over - convert all the instruction/scripts into Ansible playbook(s), and only stopping when doing a clear vagrant up or vagrant reload we will have a fully working environment. As our Vagrant environment is now functional, it's time to break it! This is the moment to look for how things can be done better (too rigid/too lose versioning? Sloppy environment setup?) and replace them with the right way to do stuff, one that won't bite us in the backside. This is the point, and the best opportunity, to upcycle the existing way of doing dev environment to produce a proper, production-grade product.

            I should probably digress here for a moment and explain why. I firmly believe that the way you deploy production is the same way you should deploy develop, shy of few debugging-friendly setting. This way you avoid the discrepancy between how production work vs how development works, which almost always causes major pains in the back of the neck, and with use of proper tools should mean no more work for the developers. That's why we start with Vagrant as developer boxes should be as easy as vagrant up, but the meat of our product lies in Ansible which will do meat of the work and can be applied to almost anything: AWS, bare metal, docker, LXC, in open net, behind vpn - you name it.

            We must also give proper consideration to monitoring and logging hoovering at this point. My generic answer here is to grab Elasticsearch, Kibana, and Logstash. While for different use cases there may be better solutions, this one is well battle-tested, performs reasonably and is very easy to scale both vertically (within some limits) and horizontally. Logstash rules are easy to write and are well supported in maintenance through Ansible, which as I've mentioned earlier, are at the very core of things, and creating triggers/reports and alerts based on Elastic and Kibana is generally a breeze, including some quite complex aggregations.

            If we are happy with the state of the Ansible it's time to move on and put all those roles and playbooks to work. Namely, we need something to manage our CI/CD pipelines. For me, the choice is obvious: TeamCity. It's modern, robust and unlike most of the light-weight alternatives, it's transparent. What I mean by that is that it doesn't tell you how to do things, doesn't limit your ways to deploy, or test, or package for that matter. Instead, it provides a developer-friendly and rich playground for your pipelines. You can do most the same with Jenkins, but it has a quite dated look and feel to it, while also missing some key functionality that must be brought in via plugins (like quality REST API which comes built-in with TeamCity). It also comes with all the common-handy plugins like Slack or Apache Maven integration.

            The exact flow between CI and CD varies too greatly from one application to another to describe, so I will outline a few rules that guide me in it: 1. Make build steps as small as possible. This way when something breaks, we know exactly where, without needing to dig and root around. 2. All security credentials besides development environment must be sources from individual Vault instances. Keys to those containers should exist only on the CI/CD box and accessible by a few people (the less the better). This is pretty self-explanatory, as anything besides dev may contain sensitive data and, at times, be public-facing. Because of that appropriate security must be present. TeamCity shines in this department with excellent secrets-management. 3. Every part of the build chain shall consume and produce artifacts. If it creates nothing, it likely shouldn't be its own build. This way if any issue shows up with any environment or version, all developer has to do it is grab appropriate artifacts to reproduce the issue locally. 4. Deployment builds should be directly tied to specific Git branches/tags. This enables much easier tracking of what caused an issue, including automated identifying and tagging the author (nothing like automated regression testing!).

            Speaking of deployments, I generally try to keep it simple but also with a close eye on the wallet. Because of that, I am more than happy with AWS or another cloud provider, but also constantly peeking at the loads and do we get the value of what we are paying for. Often enough the pattern of use is not constantly erratic, but rather has a firm baseline which could be migrated away from the cloud and into bare metal boxes. That is another part where this approach strongly triumphs over the common Docker and CircleCI setup, where you are very much tied in to use cloud providers and getting out is expensive. Here to embrace bare-metal hosting all you need is a help of some container-based self-hosting software, my personal preference is with Proxmox and LXC. Following that all you must write are ansible scripts to manage hardware of Proxmox, similar way as you do for Amazon EC2 (ansible supports both greatly) and you are good to go. One does not exclude another, quite the opposite, as they can live in great synergy and cut your costs dramatically (the heavier your base load, the bigger the savings) while providing production-grade resiliency.

            See more
            Vagrant logo

            Vagrant

            11.8K
            7.7K
            1.5K
            A tool for building and distributing development environments
            11.8K
            7.7K
            + 1
            1.5K
            PROS OF VAGRANT
            • 352
              Development environments
            • 290
              Simple bootstraping
            • 237
              Free
            • 139
              Boxes
            • 130
              Provisioning
            • 84
              Portable
            • 81
              Synced folders
            • 69
              Reproducible
            • 51
              Ssh
            • 44
              Very flexible
            • 5
              Works well, can be replicated easily with other devs
            • 5
              Easy-to-share, easy-to-version dev configuration
            • 3
              Great
            • 3
              Just works
            • 2
              Quick way to get running
            • 1
              DRY - "Do Not Repeat Yourself"
            • 1
              Container Friendly
            • 1
              What is vagrant?
            • 1
              Good documentation
            CONS OF VAGRANT
            • 2
              Can become v complex w prod. provisioner (Salt, etc.)
            • 2
              Multiple VMs quickly eat up disk space
            • 1
              Development environment that kills your battery

            related Vagrant posts

            Tymoteusz Paul
            Devops guy at X20X Development LTD · | 23 upvotes · 8M views

            Often enough I have to explain my way of going about setting up a CI/CD pipeline with multiple deployment platforms. Since I am a bit tired of yapping the same every single time, I've decided to write it up and share with the world this way, and send people to read it instead ;). I will explain it on "live-example" of how the Rome got built, basing that current methodology exists only of readme.md and wishes of good luck (as it usually is ;)).

            It always starts with an app, whatever it may be and reading the readmes available while Vagrant and VirtualBox is installing and updating. Following that is the first hurdle to go over - convert all the instruction/scripts into Ansible playbook(s), and only stopping when doing a clear vagrant up or vagrant reload we will have a fully working environment. As our Vagrant environment is now functional, it's time to break it! This is the moment to look for how things can be done better (too rigid/too lose versioning? Sloppy environment setup?) and replace them with the right way to do stuff, one that won't bite us in the backside. This is the point, and the best opportunity, to upcycle the existing way of doing dev environment to produce a proper, production-grade product.

            I should probably digress here for a moment and explain why. I firmly believe that the way you deploy production is the same way you should deploy develop, shy of few debugging-friendly setting. This way you avoid the discrepancy between how production work vs how development works, which almost always causes major pains in the back of the neck, and with use of proper tools should mean no more work for the developers. That's why we start with Vagrant as developer boxes should be as easy as vagrant up, but the meat of our product lies in Ansible which will do meat of the work and can be applied to almost anything: AWS, bare metal, docker, LXC, in open net, behind vpn - you name it.

            We must also give proper consideration to monitoring and logging hoovering at this point. My generic answer here is to grab Elasticsearch, Kibana, and Logstash. While for different use cases there may be better solutions, this one is well battle-tested, performs reasonably and is very easy to scale both vertically (within some limits) and horizontally. Logstash rules are easy to write and are well supported in maintenance through Ansible, which as I've mentioned earlier, are at the very core of things, and creating triggers/reports and alerts based on Elastic and Kibana is generally a breeze, including some quite complex aggregations.

            If we are happy with the state of the Ansible it's time to move on and put all those roles and playbooks to work. Namely, we need something to manage our CI/CD pipelines. For me, the choice is obvious: TeamCity. It's modern, robust and unlike most of the light-weight alternatives, it's transparent. What I mean by that is that it doesn't tell you how to do things, doesn't limit your ways to deploy, or test, or package for that matter. Instead, it provides a developer-friendly and rich playground for your pipelines. You can do most the same with Jenkins, but it has a quite dated look and feel to it, while also missing some key functionality that must be brought in via plugins (like quality REST API which comes built-in with TeamCity). It also comes with all the common-handy plugins like Slack or Apache Maven integration.

            The exact flow between CI and CD varies too greatly from one application to another to describe, so I will outline a few rules that guide me in it: 1. Make build steps as small as possible. This way when something breaks, we know exactly where, without needing to dig and root around. 2. All security credentials besides development environment must be sources from individual Vault instances. Keys to those containers should exist only on the CI/CD box and accessible by a few people (the less the better). This is pretty self-explanatory, as anything besides dev may contain sensitive data and, at times, be public-facing. Because of that appropriate security must be present. TeamCity shines in this department with excellent secrets-management. 3. Every part of the build chain shall consume and produce artifacts. If it creates nothing, it likely shouldn't be its own build. This way if any issue shows up with any environment or version, all developer has to do it is grab appropriate artifacts to reproduce the issue locally. 4. Deployment builds should be directly tied to specific Git branches/tags. This enables much easier tracking of what caused an issue, including automated identifying and tagging the author (nothing like automated regression testing!).

            Speaking of deployments, I generally try to keep it simple but also with a close eye on the wallet. Because of that, I am more than happy with AWS or another cloud provider, but also constantly peeking at the loads and do we get the value of what we are paying for. Often enough the pattern of use is not constantly erratic, but rather has a firm baseline which could be migrated away from the cloud and into bare metal boxes. That is another part where this approach strongly triumphs over the common Docker and CircleCI setup, where you are very much tied in to use cloud providers and getting out is expensive. Here to embrace bare-metal hosting all you need is a help of some container-based self-hosting software, my personal preference is with Proxmox and LXC. Following that all you must write are ansible scripts to manage hardware of Proxmox, similar way as you do for Amazon EC2 (ansible supports both greatly) and you are good to go. One does not exclude another, quite the opposite, as they can live in great synergy and cut your costs dramatically (the heavier your base load, the bigger the savings) while providing production-grade resiliency.

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            Tim Abbott
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            We use VirtualBox primarily as a Vagrant provider for macOS for the Zulip development environment. It's totally reasonable software for providing a convenient virtual machine setup on macOS (and for debugging when things go wrong, which is mostly how we use it since the Vagrant provider for macOS just works).

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