I’ve been playing a lot with Docker recently and while learning more about it I came across “Another Union File System” (AUFS) + its Copy On Write (COW) capabilities and have been pretty impressed by it. In short, by using a COW + union file system Docker makes things really cheap when it comes to disk usage. The idea of COW filesystems along with a couple GitHub issues, some tweets exchanged with @rcarmo and this post on improvements made on lxc-clone was enough to trigger my interest on BTRFS and I went out to learn more about it. Read more

A while ago I stumbled across this benchmark by Brandon Liu on StackMachine’s blog comparing the numbers for performing some typical tasks on his physical machine and doing the same thing using virtual machines. The measurements were made using Discourse and compared the numbers of doing things on VirtualBox and VMware Fusion so I got curious to see how well vagrant-lxc shared folders would perform. What I ended up finding is that it seems that Discourse provides a base box that was configured by hand and the Chef cookbooks used only deal with some basic stuff and I’d have to either do things by hand or write some provisioning scripts on my own. Read more

Although I’ve been writing about and working on a lot of Vagrant related stuff lately, I need to say that I’m not a “DevOps guy”. My day to day job still consists of building web apps using Ruby On Rails and even though I like using Puppet (and recently Chef), my daily work does not involve any sort of machine configuration management. Configuring a Vagrant development environment is not an easy task. Read more

As I said before, “next generation” vagrant-lxc boxes should simplify the process of “promoting” existing containers to base boxes. To back that up I’ve wrote a detailed step-by-step for creating an Ubuntu Precise and Debian Squeeze base boxes from an Ubuntu Host and I’m pretty sure it is possible to reuse the ideas from this post to build base boxes for / from other distros that suits everyone’s needs. I’ve followed the steps on an Ubuntu 12. Read more

So I’ve played with Docker once again and have been looking around its codebase to find out how things work over there. Even though I’ve never wrote a single line of Go, it gave me some interesting insights about LXC itself and about packing up containers which influenced heavily the “next generation” vagrant-lxc base boxes and the upcoming work I have in mind for the provider. Starting with V3 boxes, vagrant-lxc will introduce a better approach for building base boxes and will also simplify the process of “promoting” existing containers to base vagrant boxes. Read more