Thank you to everyone who provided feedback on this issue. I've posted my question to the Islandora Google group, as well. I'll be meeting with my university's IT department on Monday. I appreciate your help!

Anna

-----Original Message-----
From: Code for Libraries [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Cindi Blyberg
Sent: Wednesday, April 06, 2016 5:46 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] Islandora & Vagrant - Development use only?

Cary, the snippet to your email as shown in my inbox only showed the first sentence. Glad to read the rest! :)

On Wed, Apr 6, 2016 at 2:01 PM, Cary Gordon <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> I disagree with the statement that "Vagrant is not a good idea for 
> production.” Vagrant is a terrible idea for production, and it is not 
> designed for that.
>
> We use Ansible to build Islandora, and, after three years of talking 
> about it we are starting to use it with Docker. We are an AWS shop, so 
> we use Docker with AWS elastic container service, which could come in 
> handy if one of your archives gets slashdotted.
>
> Cary
>
> > On Apr 6, 2016, at 8:53 AM, Chris Fitzpatrick 
> > <[log in to unmask]>
> wrote:
> >
> > Vagrant is not a good idea for production. It's really for people to 
> > work against a copy of the production environment.
> > Like you can use Vagrant, then update a ansible or puppet or chef 
> > script then deploy that to yr VM.
> > Hashicorp is making something called Otto which is supposed to 
> > replace Vagrant for end-to-end deployments like this, but that's in alpha now.
> >
> > Vagrant isn't  like virtualenv at all. Virtualenv is a way to 
> > maintain Python dependencies by mucking around with some environment variables.
> It's
> > more like Ruby's bundler.
> >
> > It's kinda more like Docker. Docker makes linux containers. Nobody 
> > knows what those are, but they work great.
> >
> > I've seen Vagrant used in production and it supposedly worked well 
> > but
> the
> > guy who set it up left and things went bad. It wasn't a performance
> issue,
> > it's just really hard for the replacement to figure out what's going on.
> > Use Vagrant with Ansible/Puppet/Chef. Or use Docker. Or use all of 
> > that, for the win.
> >
> >
> >
> > On Wed, Apr 6, 2016 at 3:55 PM, Francis Kayiwa <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> >
> >> On 4/6/16 9:49 AM, Annamarie C Klose wrote:
> >>
> >>> Hi, all,
> >>>
> >>> Can anyone provide a technical explanation as to why it is not 
> >>> appropriate to install Islandora on a public server with Vagrant?
> Despite
> >>> all the documentation instructing that Vagrant is for development
> only, my
> >>> university's IT department thinks Vagrant makes Islandora more 
> >>> secure
> for
> >>> production use. They have also stated "Vagrant is used to keep
> dependencies
> >>> separate on machines in the same way Pythons Virtualenv or Ruby's
> Docker
> >>> is." Unfortunately, secure networking is outside of my expertise. 
> >>> I'm concerned that Vagrant's virtualization is a poor substitute 
> >>> for the
> real
> >>> thing. Before I add hundreds of records to Islandora, I'd like to 
> >>> make
> sure
> >>> that I'm building my library's digital collections on a steady
> foundation.
> >>> Any advice and/or explanations to give IT is welcome.
> >>>
> >>
> >>
> >> If we agree  that your University IT are the Operations people find 
> >> the nicest way to tell them how the developers of Vagrant view the 
> >> tool
> below
> >>
> >> https://www.vagrantup.com/docs/why-vagrant/
> >>
> >> Specifically. "...If you are an operations engineer, Vagrant gives 
> >> you a disposable environment and consistent workflow for developing 
> >> and
> testing
> >> infrastructure management scripts..."
> >>
> >> You are also correct in being wary about having a production 
> >> application running on Vagrant. A part of me wants to test that 
> >> just for laughs,
> but it
> >> will be painful to set up for them and the performance will 
> >> horrible for you.
> >>
> >> Cheers,
> >> ./fxk
> >>
> >> --
> >> "Anyone attempting to generate random numbers by deterministic 
> >> means is, of course, living in a state of sin."
> >> -- John Von Neumann
> >>
>