Mathias shares the joys and sorrows of running dev env on GCP

I am a devops person for a webhosting company here to discuss the joys and sorrows of running dev VMs in GCP. 

The joys are I have easy access to support developers and see what they are seeing in real time and deploy the same automation on the same OS as our staging and prod environments. 

The biggest issue is resource consumption. VSCode has a bunch of useful extensions like live share and intelphense that make our devs lives easier and use a 1gb of ram on the remote server each. So we run into resource consumption issues were the machine will poo because it is out of memory. 

This seems to be the common issue with any sort of VDI that I have heard of or run into. Admin's lives are way easier and the amount of it works machine tickets goes way down but the anything sort of a full blown laptops worth of resources will lead to a subpar ux. 

We are planning on moving back to a local dev environment based on docker but that will also mean another platform that needs to be maintained since we will need to replicate any changes from our current VM and ansible based setup in docker.