[halicarnassus]

Having a managed and even versioned workspace is an awesome proposition.

Unfortunately you pay for a 4-core 8GB RAM instance, which is only used 40 hours a week, more than for a comparable 8 to 16-core 32GB RAM local PC or laptop, which you use for three years.

[cheschire]

The numbers don’t start to approach similarity probably until you’re managing dev machines for hundreds, if not thousands of developers. Then you’re starting to talk about the scale needed have managers dedicated to the sysadmins, managers dedicated to dev network ops, etc etc. Those are all people you could outsource to the cloud.

But I imagine it’s the same value prop as other cloud services. It’s often cheaper to run legacy architecture in legacy ways, but there are technologies and concepts only available when running at cloud scale, and for those use cases you’re getting a discount over trying to roll your own.

[halicarnassus]

You're mostly right. The problem I experienced is, that those people managing the old machine spec the new to lowly, because the prices are high. The optimize like before: for them and not the users.

The result is not just added latency, but actually slower build times etc. compared to your local laptop, not to speak about a high-performance PC.