[schleyfox]

One of the neat tricks with using the localhost HAProxy is that developer mode can just be a single Vagrant VM with all services configured to run on the port that they would have in Synapse. With HAProxy all the production servers think they are talking to localhost, and in development they actually are. The Vagrant VM can then be configured/reconfigured using Chef and the production cookbooks (with some overrides in the roles or environments). It should also be possible (though not entirely trivial) to run some of the services in the cloud for development, allowing developers to switch in and out the components that they need to actively develop.