Scaling Support with Vagrant & Terraform

The Datadog Solutions Team uses Hashicorp's Vagrant to reproduce customer issues by creating virtual machines that mimic the unique environments of their clients. However, setting up these full reproduction environments can be time-consuming and complex due to the need for specific operating systems, kernels, and container technologies. To address this issue, the team leverages Vagrant's provisioning feature, which allows them to automate installation and configuration steps using configuration management tools or bash scripts. They maintain a shared GitHub repository containing virtual machines used for reproducing customer issues, with each VM having its own directory containing a Vagrantfile and setup script. This approach enables the team to share their reproduction environments and avoid redundant work when troubleshooting similar problems. Additionally, they have extended this solution by using Hashicorp's Terraform tool to manage remote instances in cloud environments like AWS. By maintaining a consistent directory structure and reusing Vagrant's setup scripts and data files, the team can quickly provision reproduction environments on EC2 instances that can be left running for longer periods and shared with other team members. This approach allows them to collaborate more effectively on reproducing customer issues and providing demonstrations of specific integrations. Future improvements include better modularization of setup scripts and exploring Hashicorp's Consul backend system for managing Terraform states.