we use virtualbox and a bare template Ubuntu image. the workflow is like this. developer installs virtualbox and downloads the small image to this laptop. The

we use virtualbox and a bare template Ubuntu image. the workflow is like this. developer installs virtualbox and downloads the small image to this laptop. Then the developers does a git pull of our Ansible code, the Ansible code contains a subdirectory with shell scripts that can create headless virtualmachines for any of our application stacks. Then he does an ansible run against this new machine and Ansible will provision a full instance running our stack on this new dev environment Python + MySQL Kafka/ Flume Mongodb Hadoop basically the developer can have a full stack running on his machine and it is not slow. Most machines have 16Gigs of memory and lots of cpu power so we haven't had anyone complain that things are slow. Developers can create or destroy environments and they know they can rebuild them locally. We tried doing this with docker and got it working but it was actually slower in docker and don't get me started using docker on the mac. the devs hated it and love ansible better