I work for a Japanese company from the east coast, and I can tell you from personal experience that latency matters and that you can't beat the speed of light.

I work for a Japanese company from the east coast, and I can tell you from personal experience that latency matters and that you can't beat the speed of light. 1 light millisecond is about 186 miles. Communicate with a server halfway around the globe and you have a 277ms round trip. On a reaction test online my reaction time is 243ms, but I am pretty slow at reactions. My typing speed is about 70wpm (about 350cpm or a character every 100-150ms). Trust me when I say that people notice slowdown when response is >100ms. So ok, you'd think that 9300 miles is close enough (50 light-ms each way), but even that can show lag because your infrastructure needs to react to whatever you are typing (even Vim nowadays will connect to a language server to do tab completion and symbol lookups) and then send you a legitimate response. And all of this is ignoring the most obvious arguments: * Your local silicon is fast enough to do development and has been for 10 years now. Stop using a bloated IDE. * If you production environment is so different than your local simulation of that environment, then you have bigger problems. * Why rent your compute per month when you can own your compute and use it however the hell you want to use it?