What does Otto do that Vagrant doesn't? I mean, Vagrant is pretty good! What do I need Otto for that I can't do with Vagrant and a few scripts (that I'm likely to have to write anyway)?
Otto lets you create infra and deploy to it. So it covers production, not just development. On top of that it offers default stacks for PHP/Ruby/etc that will be maintained by the community. From what I understand, if you're demands aren't too specific, you'll profit from infra/os/apps all set up as a foundation for you app. It detects what app you have and hence you can even have an empty Appfile (similar to Vagrantfile, does more, requires less, hence the magic)
I dunno, I have yet to find a real-world situation where the demands/requirements aren't "too specific". There are always obnoxious little kinks unless you are using some tool from scratch as the basis of your entire operation. Particularly in production!
And I don't see why we need default stacks, don't we already have that with Vagrant? Isn't that the entire point of the Vagrant file and the setup file? You grab an image, you grab the post-setup file, and off you go? Is it really that much work to write a post-setup script to run apt-get and do some config work?
It just seems like we're reinventing the wheel, again. And again, and again. And we invent all these new tools just to go through and spend another 6 years fixing them, improving them, debugging them, cajoling others into using them, etc., instead of just improving the tools we already have.
Or perhaps I'm just in a shitty mood, I dunno. All I know is that the only reason I can use Vagrant in my professional life is PRECISELY because it's not for production deployment, and that's awesome, because it fills a very specific and needful spot that was vacant before. Why do we always have to keep expanding, cannot we not be happy with just really good tools for a really good specific purpose?
"Why do we always have to keep expanding, cannot we not be happy with just really good tools for a really good specific purpose?"
Because that tool, along with the beer in their fridge, is for paid by VC money, who needs to recoup their investment. $99 Vagrant licenses for use with VMware isn't going to cut it.
