It has been a long, long time since we've last posted, although, we've been quite busy as you can see from some of the many improvements we did on this blog, main website and of course the Suite. One of the main things that was achieved during this time was to launch a personal project of ours that has nothing to do with the nature of our business. I am talking about Vortex.
Vortex is a virtual machine management framework/toolkit. It is written on top of nodejs and provides similar features to Vagrant. Although both Vortex and Vagrant can be used to manage virtual machines, the approach taken by Vortex is different. Vortex is simpler, faster and, at least for us, easier to work with. We did try to make it into everything that Vagrant is not.
Vortex is fully functional and can manage virtual infrastructures by using both VirtualBox and Amazon EC2 out of the box. More providers can be added via vortex plugins. It has been quite stable for a while although we are sure that some improvements will be required and potentially a possible rewrite of some parts that are still cumbersome and difficult to understand. That, of course, is subjective.
Some of the main Vortex features are:
- Fast, predictable and efficient - it is all async from start to finish.
- Configuration files are JSON documents - you start by writing JSON but you can always switch to scripts.
- Easy to extend with simple plugins - plugins are just scripts with an exported function.
- Written on top of nodejs - you can even use Coffeescript, etc.
- VirtualBox and Amazon EC2 out of the box - provides a solid base to start your projects.
You can read more about Vortex from the project pages on Github. The project is well documented and all use cases explained in detail. You can also check out some of the examples under the doc folder.
We will appreciate if you can give us any feedback.