This week the CenturyLink Cloud blog published a post I wrote that covered the use of vagrant and chef on the Infrastructure Automation team where I work. While we use these tools to build out infrastructure for our public cloud data centers, the post focuses on how we use them to build out personal development environments as well as building out the build agents that run our tests.
If this interests you, hop on over to the CenturyLink Cloud blog and give it a read.
I especially like how we use the same Chef cookbooks that provision our personal vagrant environments to provision our build agents. Anything one can do to make a dev box as close to the environments where tests are run only stands to increase test reliability.