[ghuntley]

> why?

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

[krono]

What is the benefit over pulling an image or container though?

Clarification edit: cost/risk vs reward weighted is what I meant

[ghuntley]

It just works and attacks such as https://www.trendmicro.com/vinfo/au/security/news/cybercrime... are greatly mitigated :-)

[benrbray]

It "just works" with no local setup.

[krono]

What if you weigh that against the cost and, perhaps more importantly, the risk of laying dead in the water due to third party service outages?

[arsenace]

The moment these have an outage, you just switch back to the old way of doing it - on your local machine.

[krono]

Which would mean you get the risk and cost of using this service in addition to overhead of keeping your old environment up-to-date as well.

[ghuntley]

If Gitpod (!) or GitHub Codespaces is down (!) then if your team has successfully migrated towards reproducible environments then mitigation in disaster scenarios should be as simple as

> $ nix-shell

ie. https://github.com/gitpod-io/template-nix

or

> $ docker-compose up

ie. https://github.com/gitpod-io/template-docker-compose

ps. Did you know Gitpod is open-source and can be self-hosted on your own infrastructure?

[hnbad]

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.

[krono]

Definitely valid points.

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).