1. With a savings plan or on-demand?
2. Keeping one instance on per developer indefinitely, or only when needed?
3. Shared nodes? Node pools?
4. Compared to what other instance types/sizes?
5. Spot pricing?
Shared nodes brought up on-demand with a savings plan and spot pricing is the same cost if not cheaper than dedicated high-end laptops. And on top of that, they can actually scale their resources much higher than a laptop can, and do distributed compute/test/etc, and match production. And with a remote dev environment, you can easily fix issues with onboarding where different people end up with different setups, miss steps, need their tooling re-installed or to match versions, etc.
1. That was assuming 8 hours of regular usage a day that has GCP's sustained use discounts applied, though not the committed usage discounts you can negotiate (but this is hard if you don't want 24/7 usage).
2. The issue with only-when-needed is the cold-start time starts hurting you in ways we're trying to pay to avoid (we want <30s feedback loops if possible) as would putting several developers on the same machine.
3. Shared as in cloud multi-tenant? Sure, we wouldn't be buying the exclusive rack for this.
4. n2-standard-8 felt comparable.
5. Not considered.
If it's interesting, we run a build machine for when developers push their code into a PR and we build a binary/container as a deployable artifact. We have one machine running a c3-highcpu-22 which is 22 CPUs and 44GB memory.
Even at the lower frequency of pushes to master the build latency spikes a lot on this machine when developers push separate builds simultaneously, so I'd expect we'd need a fair bit more capacity in a distributed build system to make the local builds (probably 5-10x as frequent) behave nicely.
