My main point is simplicity wins. No need to mess with providers and plugins and tooling/provider/plugin specific provisioning logistics.
Cloud-init is becoming the de-facto machine provisioning format, it's great to be able to hack on it locally and get the same results elsewhere. Sharing it is great as well, install multipass and point to the cloud-config. Done.
> If you destroy the machine the provisioning will need to run again - yes. But why would you destroy the machine if you don’t want it to start from scratch? But what toiling is there? Once the provisioners are defined, you just let them run - how is that different than a cloud init provisioned vm?
Fair enough! I agree which you here it was probably a bad example on my part.
> Once the provisioners are defined, you just let them run - how is that different than a cloud init provisioned vm?
Which provisioner for which provider? And what plugins does it need? cloud-init is just more simple and portable to use IMO.
Not true. The moment you need to do anything too complex for a simplistic tool, simplicity loses. Multipass doesn't do CentOS, for example. Therfore, for some of my use cases, multipass's simplicity loses.
Furthermore, with multipass, as soon as you need to do anything beyond launching a default image, it's no longer simple. It's just as complicated as Vagrant. Someone has to write your cloud-config.yaml file, just as someone has to write an Ansible playbook.
Multipass on Linux does CentOS and any other cloud-init enabled image.
It currently does not support this for some reason on macos which really sucks! Hopefully it will eventually.
I also want to say that I enjoy using Vagrant as well. It certainly has it's advantages for certain use-cases. For my personal most common use-case, I prefer multipass. That's all! Glad to see there are multiple options continuing to evolve in this space!
Are you referring to this? Looks like it only works for virtualbox provider. https://github.com/jameskeane/vagrant-cloudinit
My main point is simplicity wins. No need to mess with providers and plugins and tooling/provider/plugin specific provisioning logistics.
Cloud-init is becoming the de-facto machine provisioning format, it's great to be able to hack on it locally and get the same results elsewhere. Sharing it is great as well, install multipass and point to the cloud-config. Done.
> If you destroy the machine the provisioning will need to run again - yes. But why would you destroy the machine if you don’t want it to start from scratch? But what toiling is there? Once the provisioners are defined, you just let them run - how is that different than a cloud init provisioned vm?
Fair enough! I agree which you here it was probably a bad example on my part.
> Once the provisioners are defined, you just let them run - how is that different than a cloud init provisioned vm?
Which provisioner for which provider? And what plugins does it need? cloud-init is just more simple and portable to use IMO.