A company that I have worked for relies on Amazon Managed Instances for development workstations. Basically, we were encouraged to have remote development machines, hosted on AWS, that we accessed from our laptops.

When we would first log into AWS for the day, we were greeted with a screen which estimates the monthly cost for one of these instances, and they are typically several thousand dollars for the size we need. When I am remotely connected into that box, I feel that the delays for even typing keystrokes during code-editing remind me very much of when I used to have to use a VT220 to connect to a VAX, and this with a 1gb internet connection.

I've come to quite the opposite conclusion of this article and believe that that we'd have been far better off with purchased, 16 or 32 core PCs with 128GB of RAM which ran the entire necessary container stack locally under k8s or docker-compose.