The major problems our users have are:
* They can't run the whole application on their machines
* They have complex infrastructure setups, so engineers can't spin up environments themselves
* Engineers often don't have access to cloud resources and it's expensive to waste time implementing fine-grained access control
* Non-technical people can't see the application until it's in staging. By then, it's usually too late to give any feedback, as developers would have to go through the entire development/review/deploy cycle again.
Once people start using EaaS, here's what I've seen happening:
* Engineers cease to depend on Ops, making them quicker and allowing Ops to tackle more important stuff
* Non-technical folks can "shift-left" on the feedback and participate on the review process, shortening cycle-times and diminishing rework
* Fewer bugs get shipped because people actually test things manually instead of just looking at the code
Besides that, many folks also significantly accelerate onboarding times by having these environments handy.
A search for EaaS on HN [1] shows 4 hits in the last 12 months (this thread included), for me that doesn't sound like a lot. If I understand EaaS correctly (I probably don't) then VMs firstly, and containers/cloud secondly, solved that issue for me a long time ago.
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...