[DISCUSS] Development environment for UI work

[Ryan Merriman <me...@gmail.com>]

In anticipation of more UI work starting (Alerts UI specifically), I want
to kick off a discussion about how we can best provide a backend for UI
developers to code against.  I believe our full dev environment will not
work for this because:

   1. It has become more resource intensive over time and requires constant
   tuning to make it stable.
   2. Takes a long time to build.  I think this will eventually lead to UI
   developers building less often and not being current with master.
   3. UI developers will likely not have experience with big data projects
   and should not be required to manage a full metron VM install locally.

I think we need something more lightweight that only includes components
needed for UI development.  Here are what I think are the requirements for
this:

   1. Must include the REST component as this is how the UIs interact with
   Metron
   2. Should also include Search (ES or Solr), Kafka, HBase and Zookeeper
   since REST depends on these (am I missing any?).
   3. Should be portable such that it can be run locally or in a shared
   environment like AWS
   4. The environment should always contain the latest version of master

There is currently work being done to externalize our integration test
infrastructure (https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/METRON-1352) that I
believe can also be leveraged here.  Are there other options or approaches
people can think of?  What's the best way to provide an environment that's
easy to spin up and always current with master?