You've most likely heard of Vagrant by now. It's the command-line tool that allows you to "create and configure lightweight, reproducible, and portable development environments."

So why is developing in a VM any better than developing on a local xAMP stack? Because it's not just about Drupal. Who hasn't developed a site locally, only to have it blow up once it's deployed to staging or (gasp!) production systems? By modeling those production systems in your local environment you significantly reduce the risks and time wasted. Oh, and it helps with reproducing bugs locally, since you're not hacking on the live site, right? Right?!

While tremendously useful all on it's own, integration with Drush, adds a robust templating system, and all kinds of hotness. You're only ever a single command away from building (or rebuilding) a development environment perfectly suited to you, or a test environment nearly identical to your production systems. In fact, you can have several such environments going at once. Want to check that your module works behind a Varnish cache, under both Apache and Nginx? Yeah, it can do that.

Better yet, blueprints for building such environments are easy to share with the rest of your team. All the configuration is managed via Puppet (by default, but Chef support is planned), and automatically versioned under Git. By sharing and using identical environments to collaborate on projects, you can all but eliminate the dreaded response "it works on my machine".

So, whether you want a quick Drupal 8.x site, a full Aegir system in your VM, or a local client or testing environment for your continuous delivery system, be sure to checkout this session that'll cover all this and more!

About the presenter
Christopher Gervais (ergonlogic on d.o) is a geek and sometimes marketing guy at Koumbit, and lead instigator at OpenAtria. He is also a maintainer of the Aegir Project and several Aegir contrib modules, and tools, such as Aegir-up.

Koumbit Networks (est'd in 2003) has been building high end Drupal projects for almost 10 years, primarily in the non-profit sector, and is leading development in the Aegir Project.