[crabmusket]

But unless you're doing all your development on cloud servers that exactly mirror the deployment architecture of your production cloud (I'm assuming we're discussing cloud application development here), then the environments are already different.

Some differences are incidental (e.g. developers using different operating systems) and Docker can help reduce those, for sure. By some differences are essential and desirable (e.g. you don't deploy your compiler).

I'm starting to think it's best to first reduce the number of differences that matter. E.g. if you're using an interpreteded language, reduce or isolate native dependencies so that most code can just depend on the right runtime version.