> but those tools are not useful for less experienced developers or designers who have to run the full stack just to touch the markup most of text editors and

> but those tools are not useful for less experienced developers or designers who have to run the full stack just to touch the markup most of text editors and IDEs have some ftp/ssh capabilities , and most of them are free. If you call yourself a developers and you cant upload a file , you cant call yourself a developer. > Pair programming collaboration (we pair remotely pretty often), as well as sharing and cloning environments are made possible by hosting the environment on the cloud. You dont need yet another service for that. Each dev should have it's own environment to mess up with , ( i mean , lauching a server image on a VM is not that difficult , is it ? ) and thanks to CVS you can keep a simple infrastructure to share code. > Similarly in production, many developers prefer a PaaS like Heroku or AppFog over dealing with VPSes or EC2. PAAS can be good to start with. At some point ( as very fast ) , you end up with a VPS , because the service sucks and you pay less, really... why would you use Appfog if you cant even upload a big json file (JSON 500 error ... ) at the same time ? > Many developers prefer to write code instead of having to maintain scripts to build development environments I disagree 100% , it's part of the job , and there are loads of tools to facilitate deployment. Can a dev be that lazy ? show me a language or a framework that is hard to deploy in 2013 ? even rails is a breeze now. In essence you are kind of saying , the lazier they come the more they'll pay for that kind of service. it's a bet, good luck anyway.