Introduction to Multipass

Ubuntu Virtual Machines (VMs) On-Demand

Screenshot of Multipass homepage | Image by the Author

multipass is a Command Line Interface (CLI) tool for the quick deployment of Virtual Machines (VMs) dominated by Ubuntu but other Operating Systems and applications are available. With a general trend of migrating away from VMs to containers (with the exception of microvms like Firecracker) why would we need another VM management tool?

It’s all about the developer experience. My focus is often on Ubuntu based Open Container Initiative (OCI) or docker format containers, but how do you determine the commands to put into either a ContainerFile or DockerFile ? Often, this is achieved by running on a local host either natively (if running Linux), in a VM or integrated VM like Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). Multipass promises to abstract away all the manual steps for creating a VM on-the-fly — from testing out that curl | bash command or compiling something from source:

So multipass offers a better environment for honing your container file commands, building software in isolation or testing untested tools with a significantly easier interface than…