Red Hat: Let OpenShift cloud compile your Java apps

not really the same thing

Not really the same thing: you're not synchronizing the compilation across two (or more) systems on the ends of a laggy connection, you're just sending a single 'build it now, thanks' command from one end to the other (substantially more powerful) end where all the building happens. It's really about the same thing as if you built one big stonking build server machine on your local network and had all your clients be fairly underpowered laptops, and ran your compiles on the build server via ssh rather than doing 'em on the laptops' CPUs.

Ironically we've been doing this in Fedora for years, now - I can run 'fedpkg scratch-build' on any Fedora package checkout to have the package rebuilt in The Cloud, or rather, on Fedora's build cluster, instead of having my local system do the work. For any substantial chunk of code this usually works out faster than doing it locally, even with the time it takes to upload the source and download the result. Totally different codebase from OpenShift, same basic idea.