[electroly]

AWS has a service providing license-included Visual Studio development VMs for enterprises. These run on EC2 but the users don't have access to AWS services in that sense. These VMs can't run WSL2 because of the lack of nested virtualization. This ends up being fairly painful for Windows-based development; WSL is used for lots of things, integrated with our Windows environment, and WSL1 is much slower.

[pjmlp]

I guess it is a business decision then, I never been in such situation, it was always rather easy to have a few EC2 GNU/Linux VMs around.

[electroly]

It's not really conducive to use a separate machine for these development use cases; WSL is integrated to the Windows side more tightly than a separate VM is. For instance, you can launch Windows EXEs directly from the Linux side as if they were native, so you can have a single script that runs tools from both sides natively, on the same computer, without remoting or SSH or anything like that. This all works with WSL1 too (which doesn't use virtualization), it's just a lot slower.