Pull up a chair for a moment and consider that in this moment of time you are an open-source maintainer or a team-lead who has to review the pull-requests in the video below. Each browser tab is a brand new development environment, the git branch is automatically cloned, all dependencies are restored and your software has already been compiled.
Good? Now you understand what Gitpod is all about.
Clarification edit: cost/risk vs reward weighted is what I meant
Of course if you roll this out to the entire company to replace regular workstations, you probably want something with an SLA. Not sure what Gitpod's answer is, but Microsoft seems to sell Codespaces outside GitHub via Azure and there's probably a story for the enterprise version addressing this need.
I don't see a way of committing to use this service without also maintaining the capability required to operate as you are now on a moments notice. The SLAs won't be cheap either I imagine.
Don't get me wrong though, I think it's a cool service and I can see it going places. It just seems impossible to justify for small to medium sized shops, especially considering you can get the exact same benefits from containers and images right now (and even run your own centralised VSCode server).
> $ nix-shell
ie. https://github.com/gitpod-io/template-nix
or
> $ docker-compose up
ie. https://github.com/gitpod-io/template-docker-compose
ps. Did you know Gitpod is open-source and can be self-hosted on your own infrastructure?
Been using internally-managed reproducible environments for a while now, so I'm fully aware of the major benefits.
Will have to look into Gitpod more, thanks!