I'm evidently quite far out of the loop, as I have only just discovered Vagrant today. When you're done compiling, Vagrant is that missing step between built application and virtual server deployment. Vagrant takes your app, builds a virtual machine image, then fires it up in VirtualBox. Though Vagrant is written in Ruby, it uses Chef, Puppet and VirtualBox, and is thus language agnostic. It sounds like just the thing for the distributed team that's constantly building and testing things on laptops and desktops, far from server farms. So, next time you need to test a simple app in a TomCat container, but you need an Oracle database as well, Vagrant is there for you. Enjoy!