Understanding the need for virtualization

While developing solutions (be it SPFx or non-SPFx), we might think of developing/running our code in a different environment rather than directly on our local machine. This might be because of several reasons. A couple of them are listed here:

• We do not want to have a single version of Node.js on our local machine, as different projects might need different versions.
• The dependencies that are needed for one project might vary from other projects, and there might be a clash of the versions of dependencies. This might be problematic as the versions need to keep changing every time we switch the project we are working on.
• If we want multiple people working on a project, we want them to get set up quickly for the project so that they can start coding right away and not spend time installing all the dependencies from scratch.

For these reasons, having a separate isolated place to develop solutions would make sense, as these...