Vagrant: Up and Running: Create and Manage Virtualized Development Environments

Q&A with Mitchell Hashimoto, author of "Vagrant: Up and Running"

Q. Why is your book timely-- what makes it important right now?

A. Vagrant is currently at a turning point where it is going from just being a cool tool to being an essential tool. Vagrant simply offers the best experience for working with development environments and configuration management tools.

On a larger scale, DevOps is entering the main stream as a best practice nowadays, and Vagrant sits firmly in the toolkit of must-have DevOps tools. Vagrant is effectively synonymous with DevOps to a certain degree.

Q. What information do you hope that readers of your book will walk away with?

A. As the book is targeted at newcomers to Vagrant, I would hope that readers will walk away with a solid understanding of the problems that Vagrant solves, and why those problems exist. The actual usage of the tool is far less important to me than the identification of bottlenecks in workflow and process that Vagrant alleviates.

Q. What's the most exciting thing happening in your space?

A. The push to make ops easier, definitely. Over the past 5 years we've seen various tools and practices emerge which aim to lower the barrier to entry to effectively running web applications. Vagrant helps push this down and I'm working on more tools to just that, as are many others.