I have an MSDN subscription which gets me ~200/mo Azure Credit, I think. I use the F4 instance which is 4 core/8GB. I set it in azure to shut down around 10pm

I have an MSDN subscription which gets me ~200/mo Azure Credit, I think. I use the F4 instance which is 4 core/8GB. I set it in azure to shut down around 10pm, and get an email asking me if I want to extend it. Doing this, I have a few bucks to spare on my credit each month for Azure App Service, etc. I use mRemoteNG to connect to it. I keep all code, databases, etc. in source control and on a separate disk. This way, if I want a new dev VM, I just spin it up, install dev tools (I have a chocolatey script for that;) and attach the disk. It really is enabling to have my machine be separate from my dev environment. I used get so annoyed with all the cruft dev tools, SDKs, etc. add to a system, hog disk, and bog it down. Now I just have outlook, mremoteng, and office on the local machine. May not be appropriate for heavy media work as 1) you need more RAM and 2) audio/video may be choppy through RDP. If you can afford it, though, I highly recommend this approach.