I find interesting to use Multipass. It is a lightweight tool created by Canonical to ease development on a personal workstation. Its functions are similar to Hashicorp’s Vagrant but it works only with Ubuntu cloud images. It’s useful because it allows a developer to configure a cloud VM image on first launch using the built-in cloud-init provider.
The cloud-init provider is important because most of the time a cloud infrastructure needs a variety of base images. To configure them at launch is possible but the process takes time. It is possible to develop a set of preconfigured base images from which to start, but this involves a significant maintenance effort. Cloud-init offers the best tradeoff: the VM launches fast and it can be safely configured on startup. \ Multipass offers a good development and test environment for the cloud-init scripts because a developer doesn’t need to create a VM on cloud to develop it’s configuration script (except maybe for the final stages of the development/test process).
Multipass works with a variety of VM hosts. On Windows, I think the most representative are Hyper-V and VirtualBox. I prefer to use VirtualBox on Windows, because it offers me more features than Hyper-V. This comes with some challenges, as I described in the technical article.