[tetraodonpuffer]

I don’t understand some of my colleagues that feel this way either, I’ve been around a long time but having a way to set up a ”local” environment with a local automated build to me seems priority one for any piece of software cloud or otherwise.

By “local” I mean self contained, my “local” environment is right now a single cloud Linux VM with kind for kubernetes, all sorts of k8s local monitoring / cert issuing / stubbed things, metallb and openvpn to access (with a local to my computer dhcpcd for DNS resolution) and so on, all building from local and orchestrated by a python set of scripts. All of this works great and has saved me so many times and made development so much faster compared to teams that rely on ci/cd even for basic development (where every commit takes an hour+ to deploy due to tests builds and so on)

The only issue with this approach can be services / software that has hard dependencies on specific cloud products you can’t run “locally” but even in that case you can always spin up / tear down super small versions of them to use for the setup. Python has been great to glue orchestrating everything with easy to use kubernetes and docker libraries, and aws/azure cli commands as needed.

If you have a product that you can’t easily build or deploy in an automated manner you’re going to have a bad time at disaster recovery time or when the one person that knew how that one piece gets installed is laid off.