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Madza
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Have you ever tried cloud development?

Using a local environment might be the traditional approach for most devs, tho, depending on your needs, it might come with some downsides.

  • Maybe you are working on different machines and tired of forgetting to pull and push, syncing data between the remote and local repos?
  • Or the machine you work with simply do not have enough resources to do some highly CPU and RAM demanding stuff?
  • Or you want to try different OS architecture without the need to affect the local machine you are working from?

Developing on a remote environment can solve all of these as the code is stored on a server and you can access it via your code editor / IDE.

This way, wherever you are, and how many machines are you using, you are always working with the same projects and you don't have to worry about syncing. Here's a quick tutorial on how to set up VS Code in the cloud.

Have you ever tried this approach and would you recommend it? Any cloud hosts with great price/value ratios for this?

Top comments (9)

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felixkronlage profile image
Felix Kronlage-Dammers

I just very recently gave gitpod.io as well as codeanywhere.com a try.
To give this a bit of context: I usually develope on macOS with the jetbrains toolbox. I wanted to give these browser-based IDEs a try in order to be able to do smaller stuff from the couch with the ipad - and for that it does not work really well. It works OKish but far from the typical comfort.

Your mileage probably varies if you're used to work with VS Code.

Of the two mentioned above, gitpod made the race imho.

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madza profile image
Madza

Gitpod is awesome, as fas as I've tried it 😉

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mikenikles profile image
Mike

I've worked in a cloud-based environment for nearly two years and love it.

On my blog are some more details: mikenikles.com/blog/why-i-use-a-cl...
I also wrote an article for InfoQ on that topic at infoq.com/articles/cloud-based-dev...

I've developed all of your-analytics.org in the cloud and while I don't have exact measurements, it feels a lot more productive than the 20 years I had previously spent developing locally.

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madza profile image
Madza

Awesome write-ups, thanks for sharing 😉

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kvjoshi profile image
Karmavir Joshi

just ordered a dual screen phone.
thinking about running an instance on my cloud or might stick with services like gitpod and github codespaces

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vaclavhodek profile image
vaclavhodek • Edited

Tried. Very very shortly. Not usable.

Recently, you asked a question about JetBrains IDEs and anything web-based is still too far to be comparable.

If you are not fiddling just a short script, for which you can anyway go with normal local text editor, syncing repos is not going to kill your productivity as much as using suboptimal IDE.

However, for dev, I use two desktop computers, both Core i7. One with 16GB RAM (docker containers, services) and second 32GB RAM (my normal working computer). So, I have never needed to consider the power. This setup is generally okay for my needs.

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yo profile image
Yoginth

My 90% of development takes place in AWS Cloud9 IDE and GitPod. I love em all!

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madza profile image
Madza

Great to hear it work well for you 🙏❤

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thefactus profile image
Pablo Bello

I'm using Github Codespaces