HashiCorp Vagrant vs. TeamCity

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

TeamCity is well suited for an organization using continuous integration, meaning you release code to production often, and an agile project management system. There are free versions available for small teams and enterprise versions available for large teams with many different builds. TeamCity is probably overkill for basic e-commerce or blog website builds that do not require much development after the initial launch

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

• Fully customizable build process. Each step of the build process can be parameterized and customized to address specific needs of particular applications. This allowed us to easily convert from a custom VM-based environment to our current Docker-based environment.
• Manages large numbers of build agents seamlessly. This allows us to run multiple builds on many different applications in a most efficient manner.
• Build steps can be managed in an arbitrary manner, allowing some parts of the process to proceed in parallel while restricting others to depend on completion of all relevant steps.

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

• It is not plug and play thing
• Need more specific configurations for smaller projects as well
• Online help is less available
• Basic implementation is easy but I think feature add on can be complex as it involve some language knowledge as well.

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

TeamCity runs really well, even when sharing a small instance with other applications. The user interface adequately conveys important information without being overly bloated, and it is snappy. There isn't any significant overhead to build agents or unit test runners that we have measured.

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

Jenkins relies on being open source as the primary driver for its success. This low cost is a huge factor for many companies, both small and large. The professional, free tier of TeamCity offers a huge amount of growth before ever needing to pay anything. I personally also find the user experience of TeamCity to be much better, both from a look and feel, as well as from an out-of-the-box feature set perspective. The big selling feature of ADO is its native integration with Azure. TeamCity integrates very well with out-of-the-box .NET support and greatly simplifies our use of another diverse tooling outside of the Microsoft ecosystem.

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

• TeamCity was a key contributor to our organization's adoption of Agile.
• TeamCity made it possible to KILL "It works on my laptop" conversations with Developers. If it does not compile in TeamCity - the project is not deployable. TeamCity's easy to use interface made it possible to quickly adopt a "Deploy Only from TeamCity" policy, further ensuring TeamCity Builds were the gold-standard for well-configured source code.

Incentivized