A tagline like meet the successor to vagrant is a pretty hard one to claim, but seeing as the same developers (Hashicorp) as Vagrant are behind Otto, it’s probably true.
The otto project website has a lot of buzzwords like maximize productivity, zero configuration, automatic X, automatic Y, … I’m skeptical of anything that claims this kind of magic powers, but the creators of Otto have had a pretty solid track record so far with Vagrant, Consul, …
Otto automatically builds an infrastructure and deploys your application using industry standard tooling and best practices, so you don’t have to.
There are hundreds of how-to guides to deploy applications. Unfortunately, all of these how-to guides are usually copying and pasting outdated information onto a server to barely get your application running.
Deploying an application properly with industry best practices in security, scalability, monitoring, and more requires an immense amount of domain knowledge. The solution to each of these problems usually requires mastering a new tool.
Due to this complexity, many developers completely ignore best practices and stick to the simple how-to guides.
Otto solves all these problems and automatically manages all of the various software solutions for you to have a best-in-class infrastructure. You only need to learn Otto, and Otto does the rest.
Otto, you have my attention.
So is Vagrant dead then? Not entirely, but we’ll have to switch eventually.
Vagrant is a mature, battle-hardened piece of technology. It has been in use by millions of users for many years. We don’t want to reinvent the wheel, so we’ve taken the best parts of Vagrant and used them within Otto to manage development environments automatically for the user.
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Due to the above, we’re committed to continuing to improve Vagrant and releasing new versions of Vagrant for years to come. But for the everyday developer, Otto should replace Vagrant over time.
For developers, Otto may be next thing to be using. For DevOps testing Puppet/Chef/Ansible scripts locally, you’ll be using Vagrant for a couple of more years.