Comment by twotwotwo

So I tried this the other day after Filippo Valsorda, another Go person, posted about it. My reaction was 'whoa, this really makes it easier to start a quick project', and it took a minute to figure out why I felt that way when, I mean, I have a laptop and could spin up cloud stuff--arguably I already had what I needed.

I think it's the combination of 1) really quick to get going, 2) isolated and disposable environments and 3) can be persistent and out there on the Internet.

Often to get element 3, persistent and public, I had to jump through hoops in a cloud console and/or mess with my 'main' resources (install things or do other sysadmin work on a laptop or server, etc.), resources I use for other stuff and would prefer not to clutter up with every experiment I attempt.

Here I can make a thing and if I'm done, I'm done, nothing else impacted, or if it's useful it can stick around and become shared or public. Some other environments also have 'quick to start, isolated, and disposable' down, but are ephemeral only, limited, or don't have great publishing or sharing, and this avoids that trough too. And VMs go well with building general-purpose software you could fling onto any machine, not tied to a proprietary thing.

This is good stuff. I hope they get a sustainable paid thing going. I'd sign up.

Also, though I realize in a sense it'd be competition to a business I just said I like: some parts of the design could work elsewhere too. You could have an open-source "click here to start a thing! and click here to archive it." layer above a VM, machine, or whatever sort of cloud account; could be a lot of fun. (I imagine someone will think "have you looked at X?" here, and yes, chime in, interested in all sorts of potential values of X.)