The "this changes everything" thing has become way, way, overplayed. I saw that and immediately rolled my eyes and stopped reading. It is about at the level of "code ninja" now.
But, and take this as a compliment, Vagrant does change everything. I'm so happy with vagrant now I can really say I have the same OS as my server in my laptop, I can easily switch between them and distribute the env between my peers.
This isn't just a problem of a tech curve or conservatism but one of exposure and marketing. There are a lot of great tools and systems out there that are pretty in your face and obvious to use in certain niches yet.. you'll still run across good folks who are new to them. Always plenty of room to expand! (And that's a good thing ;-))
Cool. I was considering using Vagrant for my current project at work, but our production VM infrastructure is on vSphere. Fortunately, we don't need to spin up new servers very often, so I just wrote a shell script to set everything up. It would be nice to use something a bit more battle-tested.
Maybe this is a stupid question, but how do you pronounce HashiCorp? Is it "HAA-she" (rhymes with Kashi, like the cereal) or is it "HASH-i" (rhymes with "flashy")? I'm guessing it's the former since it'd match the Japanese pronunciation of your last name...?
The "ha" sound is like in hash, but it's a distinct syllable on it's own, without the "sh". The second syllable is more like "she". The "ha" and "shi" have the same weight, so the whole word is 2 syllables and 2 morae, unlike either of the two examples you gave (which are 3 morae each.)
It usually means "bridge" (橋) in the name Hashimoto, but can also mean "chopsticks" (箸) or "edge" (端), with a slightly different pitch (largely indistinguishable for non-speakers)
Heh I probably should've gone with squashy or washy, but whenever I try to pick a rhyming word, I take the suffix syllable and prepend every letter in the alphabet until I come up with a word (aashi, bashi, cashi...). Kashi won... :\
That's what I love about it. It is a very classic logo. It evokes for me the idea that it was designed for a high tech company in a sci-fi film. Like Cyberdyne Systems or TYRELL Corp.
I was instantly reminded of the OCP - Omni Consumer Products - logo from Robocop, and yes, I also like the slightly retro-future feel.
As much as it's entirely irrelevant to Vagrant-as-a-tool itself, I'd love to see a whole 'brand identity' in the same theme. It's a small thing, but it makes me slightly happier when the tools I use have a little bit of character to them. (See also: Github & Octocats)
Congratulations Mitchell! I have always admired your work and it is inspiring to see an such an evolution in your project. Kudos to whoever designed the site, it looks amazing!
First of all: congrats! I have been using Vagrant for a while now and it's how we manage the development and test environments (+200) in the company I work at (tuenti.com).
It is still not clear to me what the business model will be: will you be charging for selling extra providers (like VMWare Fusion), support contracts or ...?
vagrant is a tool for automatically setting up ("provisioning") new vms, according to scripts.
For instance, once you have scripts that download and compile apache, php, python, and perhaps mysql and postgres, you can automatically create a new virtual machine with any combination of those things at any time. Even your applications can be automatically installed in a fresh development environment with a single command. It's great for allowing new developers to get going in their own environment on a team project, and good for you individually, if you have a lot of different things on the go, you can keep them isolated in their own environments and easily setup and destroy them at any time.
The value is adds is great, although it also adds a bit of inconvenience. If your OS likes to update virtualbox a lot, vagrant might suddenly stop working until they update it. Developing the scripts to provision a vm can take quite a bit of time. If you're doing lengthy compiles in the process and those compiles are failing, it can be slow to find out why. Once you get a module down, and it's solid, it's very nice to have.
The place it shines is setting up a complex dev environment and snapshotting that. Then share the snapshot to other developers. They then do something like "vagrant init complex-env", "vagrant up", "vagrant ssh" and they are working in the environment without worrying about Postgres or Apache or Java or anything like that when they just need to work on CSS and HTML.
Fun fact, I first "launched" Vagrant on HN almost exactly 1000 days ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1175901