What is the best practice on setting up development VMs?

Hello HN,

I want to set up an VM for my team. I am trying to use VirtualBox to run a local copy of production software environment on each laptop as that's what I believed to be the common practice.

However, if we try to give the env an initial data dump, it can easily boost the file size to >10G and makes setting up process very time consuming and for some machines that is even too big.

Because of that, my teammate set up a cloud-based env for himself and encouraged us to do the same. Even though it is creative and solves some problems, I am not sure if that's a good solution. Is it reliable? Is it scalable?

What will be your recommendation on setting up the Dev env?

Thank you.