Then you have to pay for cloud processing. Owning your hardware is an investment that pays off more than ever now that things like Kubernetes’ resource provisioning can escalate costs to the stratosphere even when the nodes are not doing any real work.

I think my next Mac will be whatever laptop still has all of its keys and I’ll just keep building machines to run linux with a one-step Kubernetes solution for development clusters. Many people don’t want to assemble machines and that makes a beefy laptop running Minikube the easiest solution to dodge cloud costs outside of production.

It's not ideal right now but cloud dev is clearly the way it's going. I'd say buying el cheapo chromebook + cloud dev environment would work out to be cheaper even if the cloud provider somehow screwed up and took off(not been my experience but i haven't needed to work with k8 yet)

I work at a financial institution that is going the reverse, potentially because of internal issues - the dev environment is underprovisioned, and I guess they can't/won't beef it up, so all the developers are going back from virtual desktops to fully loaded for local dev and testing.

On AWS K8s provisioning a basic 4-node cluster to sit there and do nothing costs over $300 per month. The amount you spend in a year can be used to build an unreasonably powerful cluster in your home or office.

It's still one of my goals to be able to get half a dozen devs in a room and be able to emulate most of our infrastructure on those 6 machines, for purposes of prototyping and debugging.