No matter whether you use a fully-fledged development editor, a lightweight, or a cloud-based one, you need a development environment setup with a database and other collaborating servers that make up your application, and you need the development environment setup and ready to go in minutes. Traditionally, setting up the environment takes at least a day, if not a week. And modern day development welcomes remote development not just from office machines, but from your own computer as well. Thus, there is a demand Here comes the demand for the need for portable development environments.

You can have a showcase development machine with all tools installed, all the shortcuts setup, have it binary imaged as ISO or other tool-related formats, and burn them. With this, you can have your development machine ready in minutes. Even if you have destroyed the environment, you can rebuild it quickly.

With the advent of cloud, most of the development and testing has become focused on virtual machines. Here comes the Vagrant.