Infrastructure automation of development workstations

Automation is one of the core practices of Continuous Delivery. While companies are getting better at automating the management of infrastructure and environments, one commonly forgotten aspect is infrastructure automation of development workstations. This leads to huge gains in productivity by avoiding manually building specific environments and allows a seamless pairing environment. As with other parts of the environment, tools like Puppet and Chef can be used though they are not entirely necessary as the judicious use of platform packaging and language build tools can be sufficient.