Developers rejoice! Vagrant finds a home in the Amazon cloud

Development teams love Vagrant, the open-source tool that automates — and really speeds up — configuration of the virtual environments they need to build and test software.  Now Hashicorp is previewing a Vagrant plug-in for Amazon Web Services that will let developers who use Vagrant for local configuration, hook right into Amazon’s public cloud as well.

Used by companies including Expedia, LivingSocial, Yammer, and Mozilla,Vagrant was the brainchild of Mitchell Hashimoto, who developed it in 2010 as a University of Washington student for his own projects. Last November, he launched Hashicorp to bring Vagrant — which thus far only supports Oracle VirtualBox —  to more mainstream platforms including VMware Fusion, Workstation and vSphere. That support is still on its way.
According to the web post announcing the AWS news:

“Using the same Vagrant workflow you’ve come to know and love, you will be able to launch and provision instances in EC2 or VPC, just as you would a VirtualBox machine today. Paired with local virtualization, the AWS provider can vastly improve your end-to-end workflow, unlocking use cases for Vagrant which simply didn’t exist before.”

Hashicorp is now offering a sneak peek at its AWS provider plug-in for Vagrant 1.1 which will be made available under the open-source MIT License. The actual software will be released — along with Vagrant 1.1, later this month, according to the post.

As more applications get deployed on the public cloud or in hybrid cloud environments, a tool like this one, that lets developers set up and deploy their work across boundaries, will be critical.

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