Amazon Linux 2 for Vagrant

From Amazon Web Services:

Amazon Linux 2 is the next generation of Amazon Linux, a Linux server operating system from Amazon Web Services (AWS). It is designed to provide a secure, stable, and high performance execution environment for customers to develop and run a wide variety of cloud and enterprise applications. With Amazon Linux 2, customers get an application environment that offers long term support with access to the latest innovations in the Linux community.

Using the Amazon Linux 2 Vagrant Box

If your intention is only to use this box, you can open your Vagrantfile and set:

config.vm.box = "skyzyx/amazon-linux"

See Vagrant Cloud for more information.

Why Amazon Linux 2?

Amazon Linux 2 (AL2) is the next-generation of Amazon Linux — a lighter-weight OS commonly used with Amazon EC2. Amazon Linux is a fork of CentOS, which in-turn is a fork of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).

Previously, I maintained a CentOS 7 Vagrant box. Amazon Linux is a smaller, more focused variation of CentOS, and is a natural progression of the CentOS Vagrant box.

Why Vagrant instead of Docker?

This is a bad question.

A better question is: Why run Docker inside of Vagrant instead of using Docker for Mac or Docker for Windows?

There are a few answers to this:

• Faster disk I/O — Vagrant can be configured to use NFS. This results in objectively faster disk I/O than what "native" Docker provides.

• Easier scripting around Docker tools — If you want to generate scripts which wrap docker or docker-compose, it's easier to support a single OS.

• Shared development environment — Simplified onboarding for teams. Just install Vagrant, vagrant up && vagrant ssh, and you can get straight to work building your Docker images and testing your containers.

• "Native" Docker isn't truly native, so much as invisible — For both Docker for Mac or Docker for Windows, a miniature Linux VM is spun-up. This is because Docker leverages a feature that is native to the Linux kernel that does not exist natively in Darwin (macOS) or Windows. Since we have to spin-up a Linux VM anyway, why not take advantage and add some shared tooling that can make your team's development experience easier?

There are plenty of cases where "native" Docker is perfectly adequate, such as small projects with single-digit developers. But if you have a team of developers that you are supporting, disk I/O is important, or simply want to experiment with Amazon Linux 2 before pusing to production, the Amazon Linux 2 Vagrant box is intended to simplify your life.

What do you install on top of the base image?

These images are based on a minimal install of Amazon Linux 2. On top of that base installation, we install the following:

• TBD