I'm not really sure I get the value of these being remotely hosted. We're writing code on super powerful machines with hypervisors built in.

My libvirt setup does this right now, I have a little dumb cli I wrote that lets me create, start, stop, save, restore, and destroy preconfigured machines. I use it for testing provisioning scripts and playbooks. You get the full cloud experience by including a cloud-init ISO so you can ssh to it the moment it boots with my key. Didn't realize I was at the frontier of computing paradigms.

Don't get me wrong the interface fly has is super nice but it feels like the endgame isn't remote hosted computers but a nice user-friendly interface (i.e. what docker did) but it's for persistent local VMs.

Sure, but plenty of users don't want to have to do/configure all that locally, sorta like I want shared hosting vs my own VPS as a sort of analogy.

Thanks for the writeup on the libvirt setup. At some point I used local docker containers for this.