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Comment by amanzi | Hacker News Reader

This actually looks great, installing it now to try out.

But the title of this HN post doesn't really explain what it is, since a "mini-cloud" implies a lot more than just Ubuntu VMs. The actual headline of the target page is: "Instant Ubuntu VMs", with a subtitle of: "A mini-cloud on your Mac or Windows workstation." And the title of the page is: "Multipass orchestrates virtual Ubuntu instances" which makes much more sense.

This really is great - after installing it's as simple as "multipass launch" to create and start a new instance, and then "multipass shell" to get a shell prompt. In the background it uses the native Hyper-V hypervisor to run the VMs.

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I've been playing around with it for a bit, but I don't really see what it has to offer that Vagrant doesn't already do.

"multipass launch" and "multipass shell" do the same as "vagrant up" and "vagrant ssh".

Vagrant has been around since 2010 and is super mature by now. Multipass seems to be limited to LTS Ubuntu releases, for now at least. There are Vagrant boxes for all Ubuntu releases but also Debian, CentOS or whatever else you would want to run.

The advantage over Vagrant is that it's a lot less complex. I've tried Vagrant on Windows before and really struggled with it, when all I wanted was a quick and easy way to launch lots of VMs.

Mounting a disk and getting two way sync was insanely easier for me at least, I was struggling with Unison version matching with Vagrant.

Sounds like it brings lxd(like experience) to win/Mac? Do the leverage juju charms?

Eg like here (sadly, I don't think this excellent series ever got an update - it'd be nice to see something similar targeting the latest lts..)

https://ubuntu.com/blog/lxd-2-0-lxd-and-juju

“Instant Ubuntu VMs” — much better title.

“A mini-cloud on your Mac or Windows workstation” — much better clickbait.

This.

A cloud is a separate set of resources you get to use. They will be there when you go back to them. They will stay there when you don't.

I've not finished reading all the docs, but it just seems like easy vms.

> after installing it's as simple as "multipass launch" to create and start a new instance, and then "multipass shell" to get a shell prompt. In the background it uses the native Hyper-V hypervisor to run the VMs.

So it's basically `docker run -it alpine sh`?

Multipass runs a full VM, complete with its own kernel and systemd.

So does docker-machine if you hook it up to the virutalbox driver?

> This actually looks great, installing it now to try out.

same. i think it is a superb idea for ubuntu here. hopefully there are tools like this for other OS distros as well.

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