With the recent announcement of products such as Visual Studio Codespaces and GitHub Codespaces,  there has been an increasing demand for cloud-based engineering workflows. 

Let’s take a look at the five reasons why a cloud IDE should be what you or your company needs to boost productivity to the next level. 

Convenience 

Working in the cloud is not a new concept for everyone. We’ve all been using products like Google Drive, Dropbox, iCloud, and Office 365 for quite a while now. The convenience of storing your work in the cloud and being able to pick up right where you left off is a game-changer. With cloud IDEs, engineers can now enjoy the same convenience and productivity. 

Security 

Working in the cloud makes my work environment and its resources remain isolated in a browser profile. The simplest way to securely access a cloud IDE would be forwarding the local port of the IDE instance through an SSH tunnel. 

Speed

The major drawback of delivering value when starting a new company is the onboarding process. With tools like Terraform and Packer, the whole stack from the infrastructure platform, to the tooling and access requirements on, can be standardized and automated. 

Operating Systems 

Most of the tech industry works on Macs, while the systems we build generally run on Linux. With the cloud, IDE developers can still use my company-supplied Mac along with all the excellent productivity apps like Mail, Calendar, and Slack.

Flexibility 

Cloud IDE workflows provide are flexibility and freedom to work. Developers can now work from Mac, Windows, Linux, iOS, Android.

Read on to know more about why you need to start working in the cloud.