In many scenarios, using a basic Vagrant environment is an acceptable method to create and destroy development environments. Most of the recipes in this book focus on this type of development environment: downloading a base box from the Atlas box repository, booting the box, then executing provisioners to install and configure software. In each case, the entire development environment is recreated every time a new environment is launched from the Vagrantfile. In some cases, this workflow can be cumbersome for users. There are a few reasons that you might want to re-evaluate when building environments on every launch:
Provisioning an entire environment can be time consuming, particularly if there is a large amount of software to install and configure. Internet bandwidth might also be a concern – downloading files from package repositories can be
There can be reasons to freeze an environment at specific software versions rather than relying on versions present in package repositories...