I'm a former build engineer and used to do everything on prem and I gotta say I miss it (not being a build engineer, the on prem experience). Since those days pretty much every company I've worked at moved their CI/CD to the cloud and I gotta say it feels so much slower, even when working from home.

I remember twice switching from an in-house jenkins/teamcity/whatever type of CI to Azure devops and the thing I remember the most was how much longer it took a build to complete as well as the massively longer time downloading a build from Azure vs from within the office. Even when working from home the on-prem stuff was faster.

The thing is, the build/devops teams seem to be about the same size in both cases. It's just kind of worse in pretty much every case when we do CI in the cloud.

Notes

- My experiences are largely for game development so the build times and artifact sizes can be quite large.

- I've only ever had CI/CD experience with Azure, I've not tried other cloud providers

- Since this is game development and we're using CI downtime is more acceptable than other cases. That said, I don't remember much downtime when I was working as a build engineer. I have seen periods of 1-2 hours of downtime once in a blue moon but then again I've seen that with Azure. In both cases it wasn't so much the setup but a build script deployment issue.

Also being able to cool off in the rack room when it's a hot day is always a treat :)