As the cloud is becoming more and more a commodity and being able to spin up cloud sandboxes is easier and available at scale, our teams prefer cloud-only (as opposed to local) development environments to reduce maintenance complexity. We're seeing that the tooling to do local simulation of cloud-native services limits the confidence in developer build and test cycles; therefore, we're looking to focus on standardizing cloud sandboxes over running cloud-native components on a developer machine. This will drive good infrastructure-as-code practices as a forcing function and good onboarding processes for provisioning sandbox environments for developers. There are risks associated with this transition, as it assumes that developers will have an absolute dependency on cloud environment availability, and it may slow down the developer feedback loop. We strongly recommend you adopt some lean governance practices regarding standardization of these sandbox environments, especially with regard to security, IAM and regional deployments.
