When it comes to developer infrastructure, no one-size-fits-all solution exists. The tradeoffs between cost, speed, and environment quality are real, and they can have a massive impact on productivity. Whether you're a startup trying to move fast without breaking the bank or a scaling team trying to tame complexity, your choice of dev environment matters.
The four most popular approaches are: local, remote, ephemeral, and shared remote. In a survey of software engineering leaders (March 2025), we found that while most (53%) say the bulk of their dev work is done on local dev environments, 40% say they take a hybrid approach, so many of the below will be familiar to you. While they all come with their pros and cons, let’s show you how. We’ll also take a look at how a tool like Blackbird can help you get the most out of each setup, potentially driving significant efficiencies.
1. Local Dev Environments
With 53% of tech leaders saying local was their current environment approach, each developer has a laptop that can build and run an app or service under development. This means they can easily make code changes and test them locally, and then commit and push code that gets merged into a staging environment before integration testing. This setup is more common with smaller teams and startups who are just getting started.
With local development environments, you’ll typically see:
- Relative Cost: The most cost-effective starting point.
- Relative Productivity: Offers a baseline level of development output.
Pros:
- Generally the lowest initial cost
- No cloud overhead
Cons:
- Hard to replicate production-like conditions
- Complex dependencies can lead to “it works on my machine” issues
- Difficult to collaborate and test integrations
In the end, local development environments tend to be very affordable up front, but potential sacrifices in quality can lead to significantly slower cycle times…ultimately costing your business in missed opportunities.
The Blackbird difference: Blackbird can significantly improve the quality of local development workflows by offering instant API mocking, end-to-end debugging, and test-ready environments —accessible from your IDE and without requiring local installs of every dependency. Developers can mock and test APIs independently, reducing blockers and improving consistency across local setups. This means you’ll get higher quality testing and hosted resources with minimal setup (and without burning out your computer). By streamlining these processes, Blackbird can help achieve notable reductions in coding and setup times, leading to faster cycles and higher quality code changes in the long run.
2. Remote Dev Environments
Remote development environments mean that each individual developer has a dedicated remote environment (such as a Kubernetes cluster) that runs the app under development. You can make code changes and locally test them, and then are able to test those changes with that dedicated remote environment. In our recent survey, only 7% of tech leaders reported using remote development environments today.
This setup generally offers higher-quality environments for more productive teams. However, they usually represent a substantial investment. With remote development environments, you’re looking at:
- Relative Cost: The most significant investment of the options covered here, potentially more than ten times that of a local setup.
- Relative Productivity: Can yield a substantial increase in output, potentially up to five times that of local environments.
Pros:
- High-fidelity environments that closely mirror production
- Fewer local machine constraints
- Easier cross-team collaboration
Cons:
- The highest operational cost among the discussed models
- Can be overkill for small teams or low-risk changes
The Blackbird difference: With remote environments, Blackbird can power faster iteration through powerful mocking and testing layers, without waiting on your infra team to provision or manually configure endpoints. This setup benefits from Blackbird’s support for API-first workflows and automated environment setup to streamline development and offload some of the upfront costs associated with remote environments.
3. Ephemeral Dev Environments
This type of development environment ensures that each developer has a laptop that can build and run the app under development. They make code changes and locally test them, and then commit and push the code. Before the code is merged, testing is done against an ephemeral environment that runs either some or all of the application and gets torn down when the code is merged into staging. This is a very common setup for small, medium, and even larger teams, but the quality and cost of an ephemeral environment may vary.
Now, these can be somewhat pricey, but they yield high-quality testing environments, which increase productivity, so the trade-off might be worth it for the team despite the setup and maintenance required.
- Relative Cost: A significant cost, several times more expensive than local setups, but generally less than fully dedicated remote environments. (Can vary a lot depending on team size and need.)
- Relative Productivity: Can offer a notable boost in output, potentially more than three times that of local environments
Pros:
- Good balance between cost and fidelity
- Temporary environments for realistic integration testing
- Minimal shared environment risk
Cons:
- Can be complex to orchestrate
- Needs tight automation and cleanup
The Blackbird difference: This is where Blackbird shines the most, as we were purpose-built for the ephemeral environment workflows. Blackbird can help reduce the cost and complexity of spinning up disposable dev and test environments because we offer hosted mocks and deployments. Teams may also use Blackbird to replace existing ephemeral environments with a purpose-built solution that provides its own ephemeral environment, which can decrease your infrastructure costs significantly. Plus, with Blackbird, you can instantly spin up mocks, test and debug to isolate issues — all of which lead to faster, safer merges and deployments.
4. Shared Remote Environments
In this type of environment, your developer team will share a remote environment, like a Kubernetes cluster, that runs the app under development. They make code changes and locally test them, but they can also test those changes with parts of the app running in the remote shared environment. You might be asking yourself, “How do I get this kind of set up?” Well, it’s only accomplished with specific tooling such as Telepresence (now integrated within Blackbird) or Blackbird cluster commands.
More to come on that, but let’s look at the typical investment and pros and cons.
The power of Telepresence is now available in Blackbird API Development Platform, enabling remote environments at developers’ fingertips for fast, frictionless testing with the stability, security, and support enterprises need. The integration of Telepresence further improves release velocity and quality, while enhancing the developer experience.
The great thing about this setup is it’s often way more affordable, without sacrificing the quality needed to keep your dev team productive. Now, it does require some setup and additional tooling (e.g., Blackbird), but once you’re set up, you’re ready to rock and roll. Typically, in a shared remote setup, you’ll find the following:
- Relative Cost: More affordable than dedicated remote or ephemeral options, typically a couple of times the cost of local setups
- Relative Productivity: Can offer a similar boost in output to ephemeral environments, potentially more than three times that of local setups
Pros:
- More budget-friendly than other remote options
- More realistic testing than purely local environments
Cons:
- Test collisions and environmental pollution
- Limited parallel work (unless effectively managed, for example, with Blackbird)
- Debugging can get messy fast
The Blackbird difference: The power of Telepresence is now available in Blackbird API Development Platform, enabling remote environments at developers’ fingertips for fast, frictionless testing with the stability, security, and support enterprises need. The integration of Telepresence further improves release velocity and quality, while enhancing developer experience.
We know that shared environments often slow teams down, but with Blackbird, you can reduce dependency on these setups entirely to continue smoothly operating in parallel between your front-end and back-end teams. Blackbird empowers developers to spin up isolated mocks and test changes independently, cutting down wait times and miscommunication between teams. See for yourself how it works below.
Investing in Developer Velocity
The right dev infrastructure is a strategic decision. Local setups might be cheap, but can limit collaboration and advanced testing. Remote environments are powerful but expensive. Ephemeral environments strike a solid balance but need the right tooling. Shared environments are more budget-friendly than other remote options but introduce noise unless you’re using tools designed to manage that complexity.
In all of these scenarios, however, Blackbird can help mitigate some of those cons and enhance the pros. Regardless of which setup you have, Blackbird makes all of these setups more effective by improving how teams mock, test, and iterate on APIs, which is often the bottleneck in modern development. Whether you're going full-remote or sticking to remote laptops, Blackbird helps you go from idea to shippable faster and with fewer surprises.