At my current startup we are doing something similar. Perhaps as inspiration for others without the huge budgets. From very high level it works as follow: - d

At my current startup we are doing something similar. Perhaps as inspiration for others without the huge budgets. From very high level it works as follow: - developer logs in to AWS cli - executes: dev/01-start-env.sh - prepare infra services: dev/02-base-platform.sh - code can be changed and run locally. But if they need to test in the bigger system: dev/03-deploy-code.sh There is dev/99-delete-env.sh An environment is a personal ec2 spot instance that auto shutsdown if there’s no developer activity for over an hour. The idea is that all developers work (program/code) locally as much as possible. But deploys changes to their own private environment in a much heavier VM’s that runs all services in containers. Also there is a dev/tests.sh that executes the exact same test cases as in continuous integration. In fact, we try to bring all checks enforced during CI to be available to developers in their semi-remote-dev area environments for quick feedbacks.