It's important for a developer, especially if there are many people working on the same application, to have a standardized environment. If you are not using container technology (refer to Chapter 9, Container Virtualization in Azure, and Chapter 10, Working with Azure Kubernetes Service, to find out more about this technology), Vagrant is a great tool that helps developers with this and manages the life cycle of a VM to get things running very quickly in a reproducible way. It provisions the setup based on image offerings or a custom VHD. It's everything you need if you want to develop your application in the cloud.

But if you want more complex environments, building your own images, multi-machine deployments, cross-cloud environments, and so on, it's not completely impossible, but as soon as you try, you will see that Vagrant is not made for those scenarios.

This is where another HashiCorp product comes in handy: Packer. In this section, we're going...