Application development using virtual machines: comparison between local and remote development

Abstract

A company identified a need to improve performance and reduce the utilization of programmer machines due to the services and technologies used in application development. Based on this, this work created and configured virtual machines in local and remote environments and then compared them. For the methodology, the hardware and software requirements needed by programmers were analyzed; the environment (local or cloud) was selected; the Terraform and Ansible configuration files were created; the machines were created in the chosen environment; and tests were subsequently performed to validate the configurations and analyze performance. The work presented positive results, as expected, showing that the virtual machines (local and remote) perform equally or better than the programmer machines, despite having inferior hardware. It was also observed that, with the use of these machines, there was a reduction in resource utilization on the programmer machines. Analyzing the costs, it was concluded that, for this type of application, the use of local machines offers a better cost-benefit.