Initially, Vagrant ran only on Oracle’s VirtualBox, but in November, Vagrant creator Mitchell Hashimoto said he planned to add support for more platforms including VMware Fusion. He launched a company, Hashicorp, to do this and to offer ancillary services for Vagrant.

In February, Hashicorp started testing a plugin for Amazon Web Services so that developers using Vagrant for local configuration can also hook right into Amazon’s public cloud. The new Rackspace support gives them a choice of clouds as well.

For companies with many developers, configuring each machine for their work can take days or even weeks. Vagrant automates that workflow. As Hashimoto told me last fall, Vagrant makes it much easier to create isolated virtualized sandboxes for each project. Vagrant hooks both into VirtualBox (and now Fusion) and uses CFEngine, Chef or Puppet to set up the workspaces.

Vagrant was initially a labor of love — or maybe of necessity — for Hashimoto, who built it for his own projects as a student at the University of Washington. But it took off beyond his expectations. Users include DISQUS, BBC News, Mozilla, Yammer, Expedia, LivingSocial, Nokia, and the New York Times.

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Reached by email, Hashicorp founder Mitchell Hashimoto said there is pent-up demand for this product.

“Vagrant + AWS is a big deal because it is the first time developers can use Vagrant outside of their own local machines. This unlocks capabilities never before seen with Vagrant before. This is really just the tip of the iceberg with what is possible with Vagrant 1.1, the release I’ve been working on for nearly a year now.”

Excellent news > RT @hashicorp: Vagrant AWS Provider. Launch, provision, and manage EC2/VPC instances hashicorp.com/blog/preview-v…—
Tim Freeman (@peakscale) February 13, 2013

Used by companies including Expedia, LivingSocial, Yammer, and Mozilla,Vagrant was the brainchild of Hashimoto, who developed it in 2010 as a University of Washington student for his own projects. Last November, he launched Hashicorp to bring Vagrant — which thus far only supports Oracle VirtualBox —  to more mainstream platforms including VMware Fusion, Workstation and vSphere. That support is still on its way.
According to the web post announcing the AWS news:

“Using the same Vagrant workflow you’ve come to know and love, you will be able to launch and provision instances in EC2 or VPC, just as you would a VirtualBox machine today. Paired with local virtualization, the AWS provider can vastly improve your end-to-end workflow, unlocking use cases for Vagrant which simply didn’t exist before.”

Hashicorp is now offering a sneak peek at its AWS provider plug-in for Vagrant 1.1 which will be made available under the open-source MIT License. The actual software will be released — along with Vagrant 1.1, later this month, according to the post.

As more applications get deployed on the public cloud or in hybrid cloud environments, a tool like this one, that lets developers set up and deploy their work across boundaries, will be critical.

This story was updated at 5:51 p.m. PDT with Hashimoto’s comment.

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A few years ago, while still a student at the University of Washington, Hashimoto created Vagrant, open source software that automates the workflow needed for this setup.

The software, which so far works with Oracle’s VirtualBox on the developer’s PC, enables the creation of isolated sandboxes for each project. “You give them the computer with Git [versioning] installed and Vagrant, you double click and it clones out your environment … Vagrant hooks into Virtualbox and uses CFEngine, Chef or Puppet to set up your virtual workspaces,” Hashimoto said.

In his view, this is no small problem to attack. When companies hire a new developer, it can take a week or two to set up each machine manually, he said. “Vagrant automates all that. You type it in and in three minutes it’s up and running,” Hashimoto told me recently.

Vagrant already claims big-name users at Yammer, Disqus, the BBC News, Mozilla, Expedia, LivingSocial and Nokia. With companies like that in the fold, he figured it was time to promote Vagrant from side project to a real business.

HashiCorp, which Hashimoto is funding himself for now, will expand Vagrant beyond VirtualBox with support for VMware Fusion, VMware Workstation and vSphere to follow. While core Vagrant will remain free and open source, HashiCorp will charge for support, training, services, and add-ons, he said.

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