Comment by jb_s

Our development environments have been azure VMs for ages.

Latency is not really an issue to be honest. I think ping is about 15ms which is much less than the lag in this article. Right now I'm using the horrible, 2012-era work laptop with just Chrome running and there are delays typing this comment into HN which is a super lean site as it is.

The main downsides are actually

* crap single-threaded performance (don't think Azure has VMs over 3ghz except maybe the highly expensive GPU ones)

* Slow IO

* Video and audio over RDP really doesn't work.. no hardware graphics accel either... reduced ability to work on multimedia, we had one webapp where WebGL wound up behaving differently which we didnt