[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?

[krono]

So if our workspace environments are fully reproducible and trivial to deploy already, what additional benefits do these services bring to the table? (circling back to my original question :) )

Been using internally-managed reproducible environments for a while now, so I'm fully aware of the major benefits.

Will have to look into Gitpod more, thanks!

[ghuntley]

Context switching https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28431406 and software development in the cloud means you don't need fast internet https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26284635 and a companies intellectual property is not on employee/contractor devices.