Choose your own adventure. You begin your new pie in the sky project on the shiny new Google Workstation. One day the big G in the sky:

A) suddenly suspends your workstation without notice and no recourse or contact for tech support. after giving up all hope, ignore this account and then eventually go to (B) or (C)

B) Cancels the entire Workstation product

C) Loses interest in Workstation and leaves it to slowly die with a minimum life support and no bug fixes or updates for years and then... Go to (B)

Comments along these lines are invariably the top-rated feedback to every such Google announcement.

There is no way that they are unaware of this customer sentiment at this point.

Which makes me wonder: why haven't done anything about this?

The executive function of a large enough organism may lose control of some of bodily functions. Or their compensation may depend upon the existing incentive structure, regardless of how customer-hostile it may become.

Because the Big-G CEO Sundar Pichai and CFO Ruthless Ruth Porat are merely stewards serving at the wish of and executing orders from, erm, fulfilling the vision of the board of directors (Larry Page, Sergey Brin, etc).

At this late stage, it's time to exploit the resources and milk thr asset for every last penny. The board of directors are concerned primarily about profitability and ROI.

Nothing lasts forever. Except perhaps man's greedy desire to accumulate ever more wealth and power. This too, shall pass.

Because it doesn’t impact the handful of money earners they do have. ie various version of Ads.

Fully managed development environments will be the norm in the future. As the world already moved to cloud, now is the time for devs to focus on just building the products without worrying about configurations and installations. With the flexible, containerized dev environments that enable coding from anywhere, No matter where in the world, devs can securely build and bring out new products.

That is a manager's wet dream. The reallity is a bit different.

How can i connect a licence dongle to this "Cloud Workstation" ?

That's something that 99% of software teams probably don't have to deal with... (I've never worked on one or heard of one that had to) I wouldn't be too worried about it if I were a company working on cloud IDEs for now.

Probably more of an accountant's wet dream. With this, you can layoff a big chunk of the IT, endpoint security, and software licensing teams.

Agree this will be the norm but hopefully we develop vendor agnostic APIs for it

+1

things like terraform are great for the initial setup, but there is a lack for tooling around recurring management -- although, docker does help the story for having ephemeral environments quite a bit

it would be great to see developer environments be able to consume helm charts etc to create production-like environments but the overall sprawl around the variety of cloud-hosted or other SaaS products that are used in applications nowadays makes that quite hard - imo would be really nice to have a dev-tenancy variant for things like MongoDB, Datadog, etc

we're building cloud-hosted dev environments (choice of VM, container or full k8s) that engineers can connect to using their existing tooling (keep your IDEs, environment config, etc) but code in a production-like environment

from a pure software development perspective, the goal is to not just code in the cloud, but to also get a plethora of benefits around having dependent cloud resources, sampled message queues/databases, etc alongside these ephemeral dev environments

we're still in closed-beta but would love for folks to try it out and provide us some feedback: www.devzero.io

Maybe Google could start some sort of endowment fund. Like "We've deposited $1Bn dollars into this ringfenced fund, if we cancel this project, this endowment will pay for engineers to continue to work and support it for the next 10 years"

No cloud for me. I like having my hardware in front of me. The soothing LED's and gentle swoosh of the cooling fans puts me at ease. I'll let the young turks bust their ass on those crappy cloud platforms. I also like my best of breed software. I don't want to use cloud analogs of my favorite tools.

Here here! ~14ms latency is noticeable and tiresome, on any remote interface.

A control plane fee of $0.2 / hour

This is excessive - takes a reasonable machine up to 55c per hour - that's ~$4 per day for an 8 hour day - $120 per month.