Discussion on: IDE’s are stuck in the past

First of all, I think that the node.js dependency and indexing problem is a totally different discussion. I will comment instead on the debugging and managing microservices problem.

Reading some of the comments and being familiar with the problem (corporate secret: blame the frontend guy if they can't run your super-duper microservice cluster locally!) I think the problem is that AWS, Google Cloud, Azure and the rest don't provide integrated solutions. So either they create an end-to-end solution with the IDE shipped or it won't happen. But there are privacy, security and vendor lock-in concerns.

There are still people in 2021 who think you should handcraft every .yaml file for your kubernetes cluster - because "control". People still want an editor that is not provided by big, evil corporation and expect that it will magically work with big, evil corporation's infrastructure. And everyone is figuring out their very own custom solution for managing services, testing them and hoping they can roll back if shit hits the fan.

So I think step number one is not an IDE, but standardizing and completely hiding the variability of the infrastructure. Setup should be as easy as to select with a checkbox if you need a dev, a stage or a production cluster. You press the button and then it creates everything necessary on your local machine to interact with the dev and stage environments. And then the debugging/managing functionality of an IDE will be just pretty UI over existing services. Can't really see without total vendor lock-in.