Re:AWS CloudShell
by acdha on Tuesday December 15, 2020 @11:57AM
(#25432110)
Those companies are going to do it anyway, not without reason. If you have high security requirements something like this is important if you don’t want to have two laptops so your development work is isolated (think what keys someone could get with a bad npm/Python package install).
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You can still do a bad install inside the cloud IDE and screw up your development environment. I’ve done this on Cloud 9.
But it’s usually easier to trash a cloud IDE and create a fresh instance than it is to unknot a bad Python configuration on a local machine. (Although you can always use Docker or Vagrant)
The main advantage I was thinking was less “I broke my machine and I need to rebuild it” and more “we had everything setup on our jump server but it wasn't documented and now we can't figure out how to rebuild it” or “someone — totally not me — forgot to clear out the admin credentials after they were done and didn't think about it since everything worked”. Ephemeral servers are a great way to keep people honest about things like that.
But you don't need things to be web-based for this, do you?
I have worked in places which say, "no code on laptops! You get a remote machine, all code must live here"
Same security advantages, but you get way more customize-ability -- choose a terminal app, font, fullscreen or many windows, and so on.
It doesn't need to be web-based, of course. This isn't anything you couldn't do before — it's just much easier to setup and has fewer points to get wrong (ever see a jump server whose owner forgot to change the port 22 0.0.0.0/0 allow rule?). It's especially nice because it works for everyone in every context without needing anything setup so you can safely use it for examples, training, someone working with a loaner machine, etc. even if you normally work with a custom configuration.