How to build a business case for purchasing a cloud development environment

The article discusses how to build a business case for purchasing a cloud development environment (CDE) like Gitpod. It emphasizes the importance of clear financial justification when introducing new tools that impact the entire development lifecycle. Two main questions are considered: what is the company's cost due to the problem or pain point, and what is the solution's return on investment (ROI)? An ROI calculator has been developed to simplify understanding the financial benefits of using a CDE like Gitpod. The business case focuses on two main benefits of CDEs: eliminating common issues such as "works on my machine" problems, lengthy setup times, dependency conflicts, poor local hardware performance, and costly context switches; and allowing for faster developer onboarding by providing preconfigured development environments. The calculator's parameters include the number of engineers, new engineers to onboard per year, average engineer salary per year, hours spent managing and troubleshooting development environments per week per engineer, and working days to first pull request for new joiners. The results show that by addressing these issues, a company with 100 developers and 30 new joiners a year can save 24,000 hours annually with Gitpod, boosting engineering capacity by 19% or adding $2 million in value. Even after covering Gitpod and infrastructure costs, the ROI hits 913%.