Docker Machine vs Vagrant

Overview

Vagrant

Stacks11.9K

Followers7.8K

Votes1.5K

Docker Machine

Stacks430

Followers518

Votes12

Docker Machine vs Vagrant: What are the differences?

What is Docker Machine? Machine management for a container-centric world. 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.

What is Vagrant? A tool for building and distributing development environments. 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.

Docker Machine and Vagrant are primarily classified as "Container" and "Virtual Machine Management" tools respectively.

"Easy docker hosts management" is the top reason why over 12 developers like Docker Machine, while over 354 developers mention "Development environments" as the leading cause for choosing Vagrant.

Docker Machine and Vagrant are both open source tools. Vagrant with 18.6K GitHub stars and 3.74K forks on GitHub appears to be more popular than Docker Machine with 5.37K GitHub stars and 1.55K GitHub forks.

Shopify, SendGrid, and Starbucks are some of the popular companies that use Vagrant, whereas Docker Machine is used by Leftronic, Docker, and DNT. Vagrant has a broader approval, being mentioned in 802 company stacks & 475 developers stacks; compared to Docker Machine, which is listed in 43 company stacks and 46 developer stacks.

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Detailed Comparison

Vagrant	Docker Machine
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.	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.
Boxes;Up And SSH;Synced Folders;Provisioning;Networking;Share;Teardown;Rebuild;Providers	-
Statistics
Stacks 11.9K	Stacks 430
Followers 7.8K	Followers 518
Votes 1.5K	Votes 12
Pros & Cons
Pros 352 Development environments 290 Simple bootstraping 237 Free 139 Boxes 130 Provisioning Cons 2 Multiple VMs quickly eat up disk space 2 Can become v complex w prod. provisioner (Salt, etc.) 1 Development environment that kills your battery	Pros 12 Easy docker hosts management
Integrations
Amazon EC2 Microsoft Azure DigitalOcean HP Cloud Compute Joyent Cloud Rackspace Cloud Servers SoftLayer VirtualBox	Docker

What are some alternatives to Vagrant, Docker Machine?

Kubernetes

Kubernetes is an open source orchestration system for Docker containers. It handles scheduling onto nodes in a compute cluster and actively manages workloads to ensure that their state matches the users declared intentions.

Rancher

Rancher is an open source container management platform that includes full distributions of Kubernetes, Apache Mesos and Docker Swarm, and makes it simple to operate container clusters on any cloud or infrastructure platform.

Docker Compose

With Compose, you define a multi-container application in a single file, then spin your application up in a single command which does everything that needs to be done to get it running.

Docker Swarm

Swarm serves the standard Docker API, so any tool which already communicates with a Docker daemon can use Swarm to transparently scale to multiple hosts: Dokku, Compose, Krane, Deis, DockerUI, Shipyard, Drone, Jenkins... and, of course, the Docker client itself.

Tutum

Tutum lets developers easily manage and run lightweight, portable, self-sufficient containers from any application. AWS-like control, Heroku-like ease. The same container that a developer builds and tests on a laptop can run at scale in Tutum.

Portainer

It is a universal container management tool. It works with Kubernetes, Docker, Docker Swarm and Azure ACI. It allows you to manage containers without needing to know platform-specific code.

boot2docker

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).

Codefresh

Automate and parallelize testing. Codefresh allows teams to spin up on-demand compositions to run unit and integration tests as part of the continuous integration process. Jenkins integration allows more complex pipelines.

CAST.AI

It is an AI-driven cloud optimization platform for Kubernetes. Instantly cut your cloud bill, prevent downtime, and 10X the power of DevOps.

Otto

Otto automatically builds development environments without any configuration; it can detect your project type and has built-in knowledge of industry-standard tools to setup a development environment that is ready to go. When you're ready to deploy, otto builds and manages an infrastructure, sets up servers, builds, and deploys the application.

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