The End of Localhost

Tales of localhost’s demise have been greatly exaggerated.

Putting aside how much this rings of “owning nothing and being happy”, I’m going to go out on a limb here and say no, cloud-based development will not replace localhost, although with the pace of innovation in that space and tangible benefits that follow, developers will naturally begin to lean on cloud-based workflows more and more. That is, up to a point. It being up to a point is key.

The cloud, as an OS, is not peer to an actual OS. Latency, introspection, isolation, and ownership matter, and as long as there are developers - no, humans - there will be a drive to own, with all the layers of virtualization, mocks, faraday cages, and locally configured quirks and quarks that entails.

Cloud should be used as a backup, not as a first instance.