AWS Config vs. HashiCorp Vagrant

To keep track of changes and to answer many compliance issues this is a life-saver. AWS does a good job providing tools like this. Any AWS workload should be monitored with AWS Config. It even is great for troubleshooting and seeing who changed what at what time.

Incentivized

If you're writing software, particularly software that depends on other services (web servers or databases for example) then Vagrant is great. I know some people skip Vagrant and just set up virtual machines on their own, but I've found that Vagrant streamlines the process nicely and makes it easy to update or swap out versions. If you're a web developer (which I am) it's amazing. I can have several boxes configured for my different projects and I just spin them up or down based on what I'm working on. One scenario where this might not be ideal is if you're running Vagrant on a computer that has limited resources. Since you're running a virtual machine with its own operating system and such you'll want a host computer with enough RAM, hard drive space and CPU to run the virtual machine properly without killing the performance of the host. The virtual disks can also take up a lot of space if you're not careful so if you have many virtual machines provisioned and don't clean up the old ones that you're not using, you may find that your hard drive is full. Each of my Linux servers take up about 10GB of disk space.

Incentivized

• It can help you define rules for provisioning and configuring of your AWS. We use it for this purpose.
• It maintains configuration history. So you can use the AWS Management Console, API, or CLI to obtain details of past configurations
• It gives you a configuration snapshot of all of your AWS resources and you can store it in AWS S3.
• You can integrate it with AWS CloudTrail to correlate configuration changes to particular events in your account.

Incentivized

• Easy to create machines with different OS's, list of them can be found from Vagrant's website with configuration details.
• Flexible configuration, user can determine what software will be pre-installed to machine. Saves time because it doesn't need to be done manually every time.
• Easily manage full environments, not just single machines, with single command.

Incentivized

• Vendor lock-in, no easy migration path for example if you want to move some workloads to Azure, you'd not be able to lift and shift.
• Only at an AWS resource perspective - cannot do desired state configuration at an OS level (which makes sense but be good if you could even as a separate feature within AWS Config).

Incentivized

• Learning curve is steep - It can be challenging for someone to set up initially. After some coaching, the basics come pretty quickly though.
• Relies on external Virtual Machine applications - It would be great if Vagrant itself could run the virtual machine instead of leaning on other virtualization software. This is a small detail, but would make setup simple.
• Better support for running

Incentivized

Vagrant is fast, versatile and does exactly what we need it to do: spin up virtual servers for local development fast and without trouble.

Incentivized

A GUI would be nice for entry level users.

Incentivized

The performance has never been an issue for us, the dashboard gives us real-time monitoring and the alert sends us the notification within less than a minute of it happening, this applies to all of the monitored resources on AWS. However we can't (or probably haven't figured out how to) integrate with any other third party services, so we can't really evaluate how it integrates with other services

Incentivized

Despite the comparison it is not really apples to apples, the main purpose of the service is quite similar which is to monitor your application or services. In terms of AWS services, AWS Config provides more options to monitor and log your service on the infrastructure level which is very useful on that level and overall will give you more information about what is currently happening. Meanwhile PaperTrail is more suited to monitor and log your service and could only give you information on the application level.

Incentivized

Docker has a few advantages, especially with the disk size bloat brought on by Vagrant's hosting an entire OS and project in a VM. It relies on native tools, however, and may not support every software. Vagrant provides uniformity, efficiency and repeatability within team work and for deployment and testing.

Incentivized

• Enforcing audit requirements
• Easy to set up alerting when there are rule breaches
• Auto remediation reduces the manual policing of such breaches

Incentivized

• Saved lots of time by being able to set up a local env quickly
• Occasionally made troubleshooting bugs harder than it would have been using native Linux
• Clients had issues setting it up, which may have provided us some security in keeping their business

Incentivized