vagrant/docs/getting-started/why.md

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getting_started Getting Started - Why Vagrant?

Why Vagrant?

Web developers use virtual environments every day with their web applications. From EC2 and Rackspace Cloud to specialized solutions such as EngineYard and Heroku, virtualization is the tool of choice for easy deployment and infrastructure management. Vagrant aims to take those very same principals and put them to work in the heart of the application lifecycle. By providing easy to configure, lightweight, reproducible, and portable virtual machines targeted at development environments, Vagrant helps maximize your productivity and flexibility.

Vagrant is a development tool which stands on the shoulders of giants, using tried and proven technologies to achieve its magic. Vagrant uses Sun's VirtualBox to create its virtual machines and then uses Chef to provision them.

Benefits of Vagrant

For Solo Developers

For Teams

For Companies

If you've ever maintained a large web application one of the hardest parts is onboarding new resources. Message queues, caching, database servers and other infrastructure pieces mean a lot of installation and a lot more configuration (see Insanity). Vagrant gives you the tools to build a development environment once and then easily distribute it to new members of your development team so you can get them to work and saving time, money and frustration.