Several years ago I worked somewhere that prohibited web browsers and development tools on laptops. If you needed to use a browser, you’d have to use one over Citrix. If you needed to code, you’d use a VDI or run the tools in a VM.
At the time I thought their approach was clinically insane, but I’m slowly starting to appreciate it.
Unlike with Terraform/OpenBao, I know of no community effort effort to keep the open-source version of this project alive. The latest open source version is still available on the Ubuntu repo, but who knows who long it will work until somefor of bit rot occurs.
The license change is irrelevant - from the licensing page:
> All non-production uses are permitted.
Devs who use Vagrant in a development environment can do it as they used to do it before.
> The latest open source version is still available on the Ubuntu repo, but who knows who long it will work until somefor of bit rot occurs.
Hashicorp products have always been intended to be downloaded from the website, since they're statically linked binaries (I don't like that they're huge, but matter of factually, they make distribution trivial).
Except the vm is some old windows version without any tools on it. no shell access.
can't actually do anything useful on there at all.
VDI systems could work if implemented properly. but that's the last thing a security team actually wants to do.
On our laptops, there are still some flows that avoid the vpn etc..
A newer project fires up VMs from a Python script that calls an adapter for EC2 (with the boto library) when run on AWs and for VirtualBox (by calling VBoxManage) when running locally. That allows us to simulate EC2 locally: it's a project that has to deal with many long jobs so we start VMs for them and terminate the VMs when the jobs are done. That also runs better on our mix of development systems. WSL2 helped to ease the pains of developing on Windows. We call the native Windows VirtualBox, not the one we could have installed inside WSL2, but we keep most of the code that runs on Linux.
There's also a thread for Zed about a path to implementing it there [0]. Hopefully it'll become a bit more common over 2025.
None of my jobs since have had any semblance of a better way to set up a local dev environment easily.
It was just way easier to encapsulate services or other things in a quickly reproducible state.
I digress..
Let’s be clear, it’s still clinically insane, even if marginally rationalized.
Works well with Homebrew, and copies all the config files that devs often don't set up.
A hybrid(?) alternative is enroot, which is pretty neat IMO, it converts a docker container into a squashfs file that can be mounted rw or used in an ephemeral way. https://github.com/NVIDIA/enroot