Chad Thompson - Vagrant Virtual Development Environment Cookbook

Chad Thompson is a software developer, architect, and DevOps specialist in Central Iowa. He has 15 years of experience in creating and deploying applications for the Web. Chad began using Vagrant 3 years ago when he was trying to solve a tough problem in legacy application development. Since then, he has made use of Vagrant and configuration management tools to support the development and deployment of several web applications in data centers and cloud platforms. He holds certifications in Puppet and Oracle technologies and has enjoyed the pleasure of speaking before several technical conferences and camps. Chad holds two degrees in physics and can be found playing low brass instruments in ensembles around the state of Iowa.

Chad has written articles for O'Reilly web publications and the IOUG SELECT Journal (where he briefly worked as an executive editor). Recently, he reviewed the book Creating Development Environments with Vagrant for Packt Publishing, and recorded a set of video presentations titled Learning Git by Infinite Skills.

I owe a great measure of gratitude to many people for helping me with the production of this book. I would like to thank my colleagues at Dice Holdings Inc. for their support and feedback during the development of the book. I would like to thank Zach Arlen of FullContact in Denver, CO, for introducing me to Vagrant as a solution to a problem years ago. Mostly, I would like to thank my family for their continued love and support.

With the publication of this book, I would also like to offer my gratitude to Dr. Robert Merlino and the late Dr. Nicola D'Angelo of the University of Iowa. They both taught me a great deal about formulating ideas and teaching others, which I hope serves the readers of this book.

Emilien Kenler , after working on small web projects, began focusing on game development in 2008 while he was in high school. Until 2011, he worked for different groups and specialized in system administration.

In 2011, he founded a company that sold Minecraft servers while studying computer science engineering. Emilien created a lightweight IaaS (https://github.com/HostYourCreeper/) based on new technologies (such as Node.js and RabbitMQ).

Thereafter, he worked at TaDaweb as a system administrator, building its infrastructure and creating tools to manage deployments and monitoring.

In 2014, he began a new adventure at Wizcorp, Tokyo. In 2014, Emilien graduated from the University of Technology of Compigne.

For Packt Publishing, Emilien has also contributed as a reviewer on other books:

Darius Kritapaviius attended Vilnius University and studied software engineering as his major subject. In 2009, Darius started working with web application development and since then, he gained considerable experience and particularly developed various e-commerce systems. While working in this field, he learned the PHP programming language and different frameworks (such as CodeIgniter and Symfony2). At present, Darius is working as a professional web developer and is actively engaged in DevOps method, process automation, principles of Agile, and other associated subjects of web development.

Marcelo Pinheiro is a software engineer from Porto Alegre, Brazil. In 2000, he started to work as a web designer and programmer with ASP and PHP. Marcelo is still in touch with Microsoft .NET Framework and Java to run their respective choice of databases for web applications. Since 2003, he has been using Linux- and Unix-related operational systems, from Slackware to GoboLinux, Arch Linux, CentOS, and Debian. At present, he uses OS X, and he also uses FreeBSD to some extent. Marcelo lost a few nights compiling and applying patches on the Linux kernel to make their desktop work. He is an open source enthusiast and acts as a problem solver, irrespective of the programming language, database, or platform.

After a few years, he moved to So Paulo to work with newer technologies (such as NoSQL, cloud computing, and Ruby), where he began to present tech talks with these technologies in Locaweb, and RS on Rails, the biggest Ruby conference in South Brazil. As an observer, he created some tools to standardize development using tools (such as Vagrant and Ruby gems), some of these in their GitHub, in Locaweb to ensure fast application packaging and reduce deployment rollbacks. In 2013, Marcelo shifted his career focus to become a full-stack developer and began to follow the DevOps movement. In 2014, he attended QConSP-International Software Development Conference as a speaker and spoke about Packer and its use in Locaweb. Currently, Marcelo works as a DevOps engineer at Moip Pagamentos, where he is responsible for creating continuous deployment solutions, which cover non-PCI or PCI compliance environments. He is currently using Go as a preferable programming language.

He loves playing the guitar and spending time with his beloved wife and his cats, apart from traveling and drinking beer. He can be found on his blog (http://salizzar.net), Twitter (https://twitter.com/salizzar), GitHub (https://github.com/salizzar), and Linkedin (https://www.linkedin.com/in/salizzar).