Actually, we (or more accurately our software automation) tweaks the images. You're right about RAM. Part of what we do when we 'tweak' is move memory intensive

Actually, we (or more accurately our software automation) tweaks the images. You're right about RAM. Part of what we do when we 'tweak' is move memory intensive processes to either the cloud or a datacenter. Our client's developers just install and use the VMs as they normally would. No tweaking on their part needed. So our clients are trading the time of their developers and cost of upgrading entire teams to fancy machines, to paying us to deal with the pain of tweaking images and dealing with the devops. Most of their developers are doing web development. But a lot of them want to replicate the entire stack for themselves on their local machines. So we enable some of that by simply having the automation create dedicated dbs etc for them on shared/cloud infra and create just we webdev environment in their local VM. For ourselves, Wwe use automation (and build it) and some nice hardware to do the development (Definitely not laptops for devops automation). But then we're only 3 people. So even though each of us has several workstations, servers and laptops at our disposal, our clients don't need such expense for each of their developers. Works out well for both parties. :-)