> Instead of spinning up a VM on your local machine it spins up a new droplet in your Digital Ocean account (droplet is DO's term for a virtual server). >Vagrant integration with AWS or DO is simply to have the server spin up there rather than locally.
Every droplet costs money, why would you want to create new droplets for development, when you can spin up a VM locally? What are the advantages of spinning up remote server instances over local ones?
In my workflow I have two boxes in my Vagrant profile, one for development (local VBox VM) and one for production (DO droplet). Using Chef for provisioning, I can configure and test provisioning locally, then roll it out in production with minimal effort.
Its a really nice workflow! Although all this Docker business lately looks like it might make for an even better one.
once the server is up, it is exactly the same as if you did it by hand
Droplets only cost money when they're instantiated/on. At the end of the day, you nuke the server and can deploy it again in the morning if you need to.
This is nice as it allows you to do performance testing as well as stability and provisioning tests and your normal unit\functional\whatever tests.
While you wouldn't want to do it for every commit (unless you had your own infrastructure with space(though you could still do a partial test and profile)) it would be nice to test every merge to master.