The development environment is a crucial aspect of software development, and its architecture can significantly impact the team's productivity and cost. The conventional approach is to host everything on each developer's workstation, but as teams grow, this becomes impractical. A purely local development environment works well for small teams or solo developers, but it has limitations, such as lack of consistency and scalability. Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) provides a more robust solution by hosting the entire dev environment in the cloud, offering greater control and consistency. However, VDI can be costly and may introduce latency issues. Dev containers offer an alternative by hosting the dev environment in a container, providing customizability and responsiveness while reducing costs. A Cloud Development Environment (CDE) platform takes it to the next level by consolidating management, monitoring, access control, and audit logging, offering unparalleled scalability and flexibility. Ultimately, the choice of development environment depends on the team's size, complexity, and requirements, with each approach addressing specific challenges and limitations.