[igor47]

At Airbnb, we've moved to a single Vagrant vm for our dev environment. We configure it using the same Chef code we use to build production -- the cookbook that installs search in production also installs it in dev.

We actually usually avoid SmartStack in dev. The rule is, your service always listens on it's SmartStack port. So, for instance, search listens on port 5678 on it's backends; in prod, consumers of search will find it on localhost at port 5678 via SmartStack. In dev, consumers will just find it at localhost port 5678 natively.

[hkarthik]

That makes a lot of sense. I know Yammer does something similar, albeit with Puppet instead of Chef.

Sounds like this could be a whole blog post on its own. Over-complicating the local developer story is a big reason that us and many other firms have punted on SOA in the first place.