Pull up a chair for a moment and consider that in this moment of time you are an open-source maintainer or a team-lead who has to review the pull-requests in the video below. Each browser tab is a brand new development environment, the git branch is automatically cloned, all dependencies are restored and your software has already been compiled.
Good? Now you understand what Gitpod is all about.
The code is still in git and on GitHub, the workspace is ephemeral. You can always clone the repo and work locally. I think the idea isn't to 100% replace all local workflows necessarily but to supplement them and to enable working in situations where you don't have access to a developer workstation otherwise.
Of course if you roll this out to the entire company to replace regular workstations, you probably want something with an SLA. Not sure what Gitpod's answer is, but Microsoft seems to sell Codespaces outside GitHub via Azure and there's probably a story for the enterprise version addressing this need.
I don't see a way of committing to use this service without also maintaining the capability required to operate as you are now on a moments notice. The SLAs won't be cheap either I imagine.
Don't get me wrong though, I think it's a cool service and I can see it going places. It just seems impossible to justify for small to medium sized shops, especially considering you can get the exact same benefits from containers and images right now (and even run your own centralised VSCode server).
It’s great to be able to bang out some code on a tablet or a Chromebook without Linux access.
Being able to resume from anywhere without thinking twice and having to checkpoint the code is also great. Off-loading compilation and editing to the cloud is the future of programming and already done at scale at large companies like google.
I'm not a user, but I have experience with one use-case where I'd imagine they're very useful:
When maintaining an open source project, there's often a little bit of tension between making the development experience more productive for you, the maintainer, and more convenient for new contributors. Using a more complex toolchain might make things nicer for you as someone who works in the codebase every day, but adds overhead to anyone who just wants to make a single contribution related to their own work. I could imagine having a "click here to develop" option would help ease that tension.
Pull up a chair for a moment and consider that in this moment of time you are an open-source maintainer or a team-lead who has to review the pull-requests in the video below. Each browser tab is a brand new development environment, the git branch is automatically cloned, all dependencies are restored and your software has already been compiled.
Good? Now you understand what Gitpod is all about.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7BINiu_Rbo