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Comment by that_guy_iain | Hacker News Reader

Honestly, mines has mostly stayed the same. I've played with various techs but I mostly work the same underlying tech. Some items get added but very rarely does something get replaced or removed. The tech gets improved and new features added .

The last time I can remember something getting replaced is vargrant for docker. And honestly, I think that's a mistake for many companies. Before that it was git for svn.

The only way I can see tech coming and going is you're always an early adoptor and need to replace things that failed. If you build on stable tech, that stuff stays around for decades even if it was terrible in the first place. A good example is PHP. It was terrible at first still around and improving year on year.

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Can you elaborate on why vagrant to docker is a mistake? I find the docker workflow infinitely better and faster to iterate for making dev environments.

If your deployment target is a VM/bare-metal rather than container, Vagrant makes a lot of sense for development.

E.G. my dev Vagrantfile fits in a small screen, and provisioning is handled by a single Ansible playbook that works for all environments (using conditionals). So there's no need to maintain a separate dev container, and a lot of subtle headaches are avoided in the deployment process

Setting up the dev environment consists of running `vagrant up` (assuming Vagrant/Ansible are installed). That's it.

You get all the benefits of IaC (fast ~reproducible dev) without shoehorning containers in.

It also comes with a lot of downsides and significantly increased complexity in many cases. Depends what you're doing.

Why do you think Vagrant->Docker was a mistake?

Most companies have a large amount of devs on macbooks. Docker on the macbook has historically been painful. Mainly due to the filesystem. Whereas, vagrant doesn't really have that problem. I've been using Linux for so long that I haven't really experienced the pain myself. But I have gotten to enjoy the smugness of them all complaininga about their performance while mines is super snappy.

Then if you look at the toolchain surounding vagrant such as packer. It looks really nice. Docker doesn't seem so nice. In fact, I still use packer to build my docker container images because I like the setup nicer.

With Docker it's all about the production env. I see the benefits for prod but for dev when you're literally not using the same docker setup as you would in prod it makes no real sense to me.

Docker was painful on Mac, but quite a while ago. I don't have any problems these days.

The last complaints I heard were about a year ago. Which point those devs left.

Vagrant still allows people to have deviating personal environments, which destroys productivity when people have to constantly diagnose what changes they have in their local env don't match other things. Vagrant+Docker is a decent compromise. Best is cloud-native development. If everyone [on a single team] SSH's into one box in the cloud with one set of dependencies, everyone gets the same environment every time, and updates go out to everyone immediately without fail. K8s has similar projects to let you develop in a pod on the actual cluster, eliminating difference between dev<->prod.

> Vagrant still allows people to have deviating personal environments,

So does docker the way many folk use it for their development. In fact, I saw in one place people set up env setups for their docker so each team member could have theirs the way they wanted it. Create a container and use forever. Very rarely in my experience are people completely rebuilding their env.

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