Plot twist: can't run any virtualization software on my development laptop and we are cut off from "the internet"(so no ssh or remote cloud).
Advice?
Developers need full access to their machines or they are stifled.
This organisation is not interested in you doing quality work.
Your options are therefore to either resign yourself to not doing quality work, or leave that organisation, ideally making sure that management knows exactly why you're going.
(Of course, the chance of management actually caring is about one in thirty seven trillion - if they cared about quality of work or employee satisfaction, your machine wouldn't be locked down. So not bothering to tell them is fine too. Tell them if you're feeling charitable)
Barring that, if you have admin rights and your laptop is running Windows you can enable Hyper-V[0] and get a great hypervisor that comes in the box. (If you’re already using WSL2, you’re already doing virtualization). If you’re on macOS, try to find something that uses Hypervisor.framework (multipass[1] is good if you can get along with Ubuntu) so you don’t need to install any kexts.
But this is really something you should bring up with your manager, it sounds like it’d be difficult to get any good work done without being able to run tests in a not-production environment.
0: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/virtualization/hyper-v-on-w...
Within the boundaries of the space is a solution, we just don't know where the boundaries are most of the time.
A bunch of years ago we were under a similar predicament, we needed to tune some software that was data dependent, yet we were cut off from prod data, and the test data as hot garbage.
It took weeks to get new software into production. We had one code push left before launch but we still needed to tweak with production traffic. So we did what everyone does, ship remote firmware updates. In the last code push we included `eval` and the ability to POST code to an endpoint. We were just doing some query rewriting, but the code could have run anything.
Once the last build made it through dev and test, we had a serverless deployment platform that allowed us to dynamically update the code in realtime.
yolo
But if you want a solution to this specific problem, the first suggestion I'd have is to install a non-root-requiring package manager like Linuxbrew or Nix (which is better if you can get a directory /nix writable by you, but workable even if not). Then you can install software without contacting the sysadmins and waiting.
Alternatively, do you have unprivileged user namespaces, i.e., does "unshare -Urm" work and get you an apparent-root shell? If so, you can install rootless Docker in your homedir, or use https://github.com/containers/bubblewrap . (A few years back I wrote https://github.com/twosigma/debootwrap which ties together bubblewrap and debootstrap to get you an unprivileged Debian chroot.)