[jameslk]

The trend seems to be the IDE and development environment will move to the cloud for larger companies. This is what Facebook and Google are already doing. It makes ramp up easier, environments more consistent and tooling more predictable. Also you can spin up multiple development branches of the same codebase without having to switch branches or stash changes (a big deal when you have one giant monorepo). And probably harder to leak any IP.

[DJHenk]

I might be becoming an old fart, but I really don't see the benefits. I use vim, so technically I've been able to do remote development for years, but I've never felt the need to. Git makes sure that I have easy access to the right code version, Docker and docker-compose make sure I have the right environment. I only run one version of the codebase at a certain point in time. After all, I'm mentally focused on one problem at the time, right?

Yes, running docker-compose for the first time takes a bit longer. But seeing it unfold and having all the parts present on my local system helps me understand this new system better. And really, how often does this happen?

[paxys]

Crossing international borders with company data and source code is also a huge risk nowadays, so much that several companies I know have banned it entirely. It's safer to keep everything on-site and have employees access whatever they need remotely.

[Corrado]

AWS purchased Cloud9[0] a couple of years ago and is integrating it into many of their cloud offerings. It is now the default editor for Lambda functions, and while I don't use it extensively it seems to work OK.

[0] https://aws.amazon.com/cloud9/

[whitehorse74]

Is the recent move to Visual Studio Code by all Facebook developers also part of this strategy?

[kbd]

> Also you can spin up multiple development branches of the same codebase without having to switch branches or stash changes (a big deal when you have one giant monorepo).

Could you elaborate on this? I’m not familiar with these cloud IDEs.