I've been building out cloud IaaS demos (VMware, KVM, the works) for a decade now and since the beginning I've always needed basically the most amount of RAM and cores that could be shoved into a single physical box. Otherwise, I'd wind up swapping to disk or doing double-nested VMs with mere MBs of RAM and that was horrific before SSDs were cost-effective either. Nobody else besides doing weather simulations / HPC or video editing seems to need this much compute either.

I've been hearing of people buying Mac Pros for cloud demos so they can run VMs on them locally because they're among the most compact, compute and memory dense systems you can buy.

Interesting, thanks for sharing. My instinct would have been to rent a few dedicated boxes from a OVH for something like that. What made you decide to go with local boxes?

Personally, I find local dev much easier.

I had access to racks of hardware to do a lot of testing but they were in Colorado, while I am in EU which made latency a real problem.