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Re:AWS CloudShell by dspillett on Tuesday December 15, 2020 @12:15PM (#25432331)
For the company: infrastructure management. You don't have a local PC (other than mainly a low cost thing acting as a fairly dumb terminal) that may have parts fail and will otherwise need upgrades every now and then, with local work that may need to be encrypted and backed up, ... You are working in "the cloud", your environment is running on a common set of VMs/containers, a fault in a node just means a new one spins up (or you get shunted onto the still running ones), hardware redundancy is handled at that level reducing single points of failer, local machines don't need to be monitored for data/apps/other they should not have, resource management (does anyone run their dev PC at full tilt 24/7? no? so CPU/IO/other resources can be shared), ...

For the individual: similar concerns of hardware failures losing work go away a bit (there are still ways to lose everything, but less of them), easy moving between environments (desktop, laptop, phone), ...

Though it depends how much is pushed to the "cloud". You may still need some meat on the local resource bones if not pushing any CPU crunching into the sky too.

Essentially we are reinventing the thin client from the 90s/00s, which in turn reinvented many mainframe concepts, not that either ever completely went away, with an eye on much the same benefits.

Re:AWS CloudShell by freehunter on Tuesday December 15, 2020 @02:50PM (#25434245)
It's the "servers are pets, not cattle" but applied to local machines. That's sort of how IT has been run for a while now, but only half-hearted and in the worst way possible.

Almost every organization I've worked with has the policy of "if you get malware, we wipe your whole machine and reinstall the gold image" which is quite disruptive because you then have to reconfigure your settings and reinstall all your software packages and regenerate SSH keys etc. It can be a whole day of downtime and then a week of slowly getting back up and running full speed.

But if your hardware and local software are irrelevant, you can just swap your dumb terminal for another dumb terminal without skipping a beat. And with things like Chromebooks or iPads (actual real dumb terminals) the likelihood of getting to a "wipe it and start over" goes down a lot compared to machines running a full-fledged OS with a privileged user account.

If you drop your Chromebook in a lake, you could run to Best Buy and get a new one for $300 and you've only lost an hour or so, and if all your data is stored in OneDrive and your IDE is Codespaces you haven't lost anything of real value.