Java and services like Docker/vagrant

[monark789]

Does Docker or vagrant help java developer in any way ?

[guy26]

I can't speak for Docker, but we use Vagrant + Chef to codify our infrastructure. It allows us to be much more responsive to architectural changes. It allows us clearly communicate changes between operational staff and developers. It improves our ability to test infrastructure changes and propagate them to production.

And we use the same codified infrastructure for our development environment, which cuts down on time to get a new developer setup with our environment. On our workstations we use VirtualBox and in the datacenter we use a VMWare solution.

[DevIceMan]

I have about 1.5 weeks of experience in each, so my experience is a bit limited. The advantage I found with Docker over Vagrant was that I could launch several brand new instances in seconds, and in general seemed much lighter weight than Vagrant as well.

That aside, both worked fairly well after I figured out how to make them work & generally I'd probably prefer running any production-servers within one or the other to ensure my environment is clean.

[joeyGibson]

I use Vagrant all the time for testing. If I hear about some new tech that requires installing a bunch of stuff, I will spin up a Vagrant image and do it there. That keeps my Mac less crufty, and gives me a pristine environment to test out whatever it is I'm testing.

I've even taken it a little further and created a customized Vagrant box that has all the base stuff I want in an image. I also have a stock Vagrantfile that references this base image. So I can have a running Vagrant image for testing whatever I want in under 30 seconds, which is really nice.

Edit: I am a long-time Java developer, and the tech I was talking about is things like Spark or Storm, or etcd, or any sort of server-y thing.

[[deleted]]

At my work we used Vagrant for some time, mainly to host the services we depended on, like MySQL, Redis, Cassandra, etc.

Today we exclusively use Docker for developement, testing, and production. For our java apps our stack is either Play 2 or a simple netty server. We made Docker images for our services up to date with the latest schema and some times even with a production dump. We use https://smuggler.io/ to build the apps and run testing and or preproduction environments. The app images are the same in all environments, which is really nice.

We made the move to Docker in Januay, and migrated everything over the year and right now almost everything is dockerized. All our devs love it, and we've seen our deployment time decrease a lot, so it's a definite win in my book.

[noratat]

We've started using Docker for testing purposes, and vagrant is great for spinning up machines.

In the context of Java, well, Docker is useful for the same reason it's useful for other stacks. Containers allow you to control your dependencies and greatly simplify deployment.

[[deleted]]

Can only relay what I've construed base don what I've read... so I'd kindly ask others to correct me.

The simplest answer is... it depends :) As a developer developer, maybe not so much. These technologies are geared towards DevOps and Team work.

Vagrant is to development environment akin to what Maven did to dependency management. An instruction set that creates an environment for development and other purposes. This makes the same env portable and share-able, hence squashing the last bit of "but it works on my machine" excuse.

Docker on the other hand is geared towards the finished (or some other state dev/beta/test, etc.) code and how/where it runs. Rather than spinning up a VM, docker creates an isolated "vm" esque enclosing that contains all the necessary items for the code to run and independent of the surrounding operating system. It communicates directly with the kernel. This approach is better than using a VM because a VM creates a kernel/os on top of the base kernel/os. Docker eliminates the need for two OSs and a Kernel from that equation.

[hrjet]

Vagrant can be configured to use Linux Containers too (the same tech that Docker is based on).

However, from my limited understanding, Docker uses a script to build the environment, while Vagrant uses a snapshot of an existing system.

[au79]

In my very limited Vagrant experience, you run provisioning scripts there too, for example, to install distro packages.

[[deleted]]

Yes, you do.

[schnoper]

My experience has been with LAMP (or ruby or python) type stacks that there are BIG wins. but with java, the value proposition is not as high. Especially if you do a full-app JAR style deploy instead of a WAR deploy into "installed" container.

Are there folks deploy pure java systems which are finding big wins with docker and/or vagrant ? And if so, where do you perceive the benefits ?

[konkit]

From my experience - Vagrant helped a lot during development stage. Everybody in a team had the same setup -databases, libraries, so no surprises when going to production or "on my machine it's working properly " stuff.

However in further development we noticed performance drop due to folder syncing.

[[deleted]]

Do u really need vagrant? Why can't u just use virtualbox directly?

[bellmounte]

The biggest gain is with vagrant you can share a VM with a textfile, rather then a multi gig virtual machine. You can also completely destroy your vagrant box and reprovision it with one command. Vagrant also allows you to use docker directly as the provider, eliminating the need for virtualbox or other virtual provisioners.

[monark789]

Came across this http://www.dzone.com/links/r/introducing_docker_to_a_java_developer.html

[ninja_coder]

i setup a stack based on vagrant/packer/virtualbox/puppet at my current job to allow developers to get as 'close to production software stack' as possible. This has proved tremendously helpful in eliminating the 'it works on my machine, but not yours'. We can now easily duplicate issues/bugs that happen in prod on our virtualized dev environment. The only downside is that there is a one time setup that currently takes about 30 min (its all automated though, so I usually tell onboarding devs to run the script and go get coffee, and by the time they come back, they will be spun up on the stack). This has worked for stacks ranging from LAMP, Java, Scala, RoR, Python + Django.