GCE setup vs Local test environment

In general, I am not a big fan of doing development work in the cloud.  Having to sync local code up to the cloud represents what seems to be an extra step in the feedback loop.

I have been using my 32G Intel NUC machine with virtmanager and libvirt to have a multi node system without a network sync process.

To me this makes more sense than adding time to each developers feedback loop for development. 

The idea of mocking some items locally so i can run my code seems to fly in the face of the problem that containers solve.  NOW - it's possible to test with REAL services and do it locally. 

Maybe some form of hybrid setup where some of the services are local and some are on the cloud could be an option but when you start sharing servers that people are testing against you end having a different set of issues. 

Despite all of this... I need to learn how to use GCE to improve my skill set - so I signed up for free account. 

After singing up for a free account I found that creating a cluster is relatively simple.

Using minikube or even kubeadm is not that hard though.  Still not sure what this is giving me... fortunately this is a free account and I am not paying for what would be essentially free in my local dev environment.