Actually the larger the organizations the more necessary a cloud-based dev environment solution. That is why all the tech giants have a solution internally like Nimbus and all organizations with more than 500 engineers that I have talked to have something like Nimbus.
> To me this seemed like a novel way to enforce strictness in SDLC for junior devs writing javascript-like code...
The key is not to enforce a strict SDLC. The key word is `Consistent`. I can see some exceptions where teams want to have inconsistent environments but I believe vast majority of the teams want to have consistent environment within their eng org. It means easier onboarding, fast recovery, and better collaboration.
> ... but never came close to having the real IDE on your machine.
If you are doing iOS development or something similar I would agree that IDE on your machine is a necessary. After all, you still need XCode. (even that, I see technologies are catching up...) But other than those native apps, I don't see real difference between a local vs cloud dev environment.
Can you share some examples? What can you do on local but very difficult/impossible to do on cloud dev env?
> If you need reproducible builds? Why not just use docker?
Here are some of my thoughts:
1. in a small scale (3 micro-services + 1 DB + 1 webapp), I think docker does an amazing job to ensure reproducible builds. But as the complexity grow, docker starts to shift from part of the solution to part of the problem. Just to throw out some questions: how to manage compatibility if a team uses Windows, Mac, Linux at the same time, even with different versions? How to ensure 237 of my engineers do not have a broken environment when I want to bump the docker version?
2. There are things should not be part of docker images and those things are more troublesome than the build itself sometimes. For example: credentials, env vars, and so on. I don't remember how many times I need to ask a bunch of people just to get the credentials right.
3. Even an amazing tool like Docker does not have 100% of the market. So we may be a good alternative for the teams who choose not to use Docker.