Developing in the cloud vs. locally?

[Andy]

I've got a couple of low-end GoDaddy Cloud instances spun up. Right now I'm using them mostly as dev sandboxes for testing out new stuff (e.g. one for NGINX, one for NodeJS). Very little work is done on my local machine.

Is anyone else running with this sort of remote dev environment setup? What're your thoughts on it?

[JHasselbring]

I do most of my developing locally(dedicated server and local pc) then I bring them online. My home pc compiles faster and I like GUI... then I do most of my testing online...

Speaking of NodeJS... have you heard of electron io?

[rd]

There are advantages and disadvantages to both cloud and local development environments. I would typically suggest that it really depends on the job. Projects that have many hands on them might be better in a collaborative environment and that is not always easy working locally. 

Developing locally implies partners and customers can't see changes without giving them your PC. Working remotely there may be lost development time because of connection issues. Additionally perhaps numerous designers are trampling on each other's work in the mutual remote development space. The benefits of running local is that you can work without influencing or hindering others. The benefits of a cloud environment is that you can test how your changes influence and interact with the changes others are making as they are being made.
Ideally you want to have both. Develop and run your unit tests locally so you can isolate issues until you're comfortable with them, then integrate them on the team server so you can check integration of changes.

We tend to develop within our local environment and test web connected products in a remote environment. There is of course not always a need to test in a remote environment. Sometimes the solution is to not treat it as an either/or decision.

[Andy]

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@JHasselbring wrote:

Speaking of NodeJS... have you heard of electron io?

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I have not. Adding it to the "check this out" list...!

[JMPepper]

I do much of my initial development locally and have several core installations that are deployed much faster in the local environment.

Like @rd, I move to the remote environment fairly quickly once I know the core is working locally.  One of the keys for me is knowing which plugins/programs require different configs for the hosted vs localhost environments.  This is an issue I've had to work out with one of my shopping cart installations.  I made a mistake a good while back on ignoring this aspect of development and wasted a ton of time chasing an error that was easily corrected by fulling reading the documentation that explained the deployment from local to remote.

With regard to connections, that's where we have to rely on the hosting company, e.g., GoDaddy to do what they say on their speed as well as making sure my ISP is reliable.  On a couple of occasions I've had to call support to report slow response times on the backend of a WP install and GoDaddy did indeed find some problems on the server I was on.  Now, before I move from local to remote I always make sure that my user.ini file is correctly configured for the load that I'm placing on the server.

Later!

James