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.