Replacing a cloud dev environment with something roughly tenfold faster

Context

A global leadership-training firm ran its engineering team on Amazon WorkSpaces. Every code change went through a remote desktop, and the latency of that round trip sat between the engineers and their work all day.

Constraint

The team’s hardware was uneven. Any replacement had to work on low-end machines, not only on the well-equipped ones, or it would fragment the team into people who could use it and people who could not.

What we built

We built a local development environment to replace WorkSpaces outright, and paired it with a hybrid mode running on EC2 for engineers whose machines could not carry the full stack locally. Both paths produced the same environment, so a bug reproduced the same way regardless of which one an engineer used.

The work spanned Moodle and Django applications. One Moodle problem came down to a conflict in a C++ PHP extension, which we patched directly rather than working around in application code.

Outcome

Development throughput increased roughly tenfold. The gain was almost entirely feedback-loop latency — the same engineers, no longer waiting on a remote desktop between every change and its result.