The article discusses the need for virtual machines for certain tasks, despite the preference for containers, and the challenges in maintaining them compared to containers. The author introduces the idea of creating a command-line application similar to docker-compose for easily building and deploying virtual machines on libvirt, called “virt-compose.” The implementation involves defining virtual machines and images in a YAML format, using packer for building images with a JSON configuration syntax, and providing a prototype on GitHub for running the application. The author finds this approach useful for testing local setups and home servers and plans to continue using and improving it.