What is the benefit over pulling an image or container though?

Clarification edit: cost/risk vs reward weighted is what I meant

It just works and attacks such as https://www.trendmicro.com/vinfo/au/security/news/cybercrime... are greatly mitigated :-)

It "just works" with no local setup.

What if you weigh that against the cost and, perhaps more importantly, the risk of laying dead in the water due to third party service outages?

The moment these have an outage, you just switch back to the old way of doing it - on your local machine.

Which would mean you get the risk and cost of using this service in addition to overhead of keeping your old environment up-to-date as well.

If Gitpod (!) or GitHub Codespaces is down (!) then if your team has successfully migrated towards reproducible environments then mitigation in disaster scenarios should be as simple as

> $ nix-shell

ie. https://github.com/gitpod-io/template-nix

or

> $ docker-compose up

ie. https://github.com/gitpod-io/template-docker-compose

ps. Did you know Gitpod is open-source and can be self-hosted on your own infrastructure?

So if our workspace environments are fully reproducible and trivial to deploy already, what additional benefits do these services bring to the table? (circling back to my original question :) )

Been using internally-managed reproducible environments for a while now, so I'm fully aware of the major benefits.

Will have to look into Gitpod more, thanks!

Context switching https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28431406 and software development in the cloud means you don't need fast internet https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26284635 and a companies intellectual property is not on employee/contractor devices.

The code is still in git and on GitHub, the workspace is ephemeral. You can always clone the repo and work locally. I think the idea isn't to 100% replace all local workflows necessarily but to supplement them and to enable working in situations where you don't have access to a developer workstation otherwise.

Of course if you roll this out to the entire company to replace regular workstations, you probably want something with an SLA. Not sure what Gitpod's answer is, but Microsoft seems to sell Codespaces outside GitHub via Azure and there's probably a story for the enterprise version addressing this need.

Definitely valid points.

I don't see a way of committing to use this service without also maintaining the capability required to operate as you are now on a moments notice. The SLAs won't be cheap either I imagine.

Don't get me wrong though, I think it's a cool service and I can see it going places. It just seems impossible to justify for small to medium sized shops, especially considering you can get the exact same benefits from containers and images right now (and even run your own centralised VSCode server).