In our last post on simulating a cloud environment on your local machine, we saw that we could use virtual box to create a virtual machine that could both talk to your local computer, with its own IP address, and to the internet.

While you can always spin up a Digital Ocean or Linode Virtual Private Server to toy around with, that both costs money (pennies, at most a dollar or two, admittedly) and isn’t an extremely fast feedback loop for server provisioning. What we really want, as developers, is a way to test out an idea, see its feasibility, and preferably tinker with that idea until it’s solid.