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Ask HN: Is anyone using cloud dev environments (e.g. Codespaces/Replit) at work?

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Re: Ask HN: Is anyone using cloud dev environments (e.g. Codespaces/Replit) at work?

#11

Post by whalesalad »

I am sorta doing this, locally. I have a handful of servers in my basement that I use vscode+remote-ssh to work with. The benefit is that I can jump from my desktop to my laptop without any fuss. I can leave long-running scripts online for like an experimental batch job and attach to that from any machine, even when I am not home thanks to wireguard/tailscale. It is very nice knowing my dev env is always there in the state I last left it. This also gives the nice benefit of being able to choose your developer env (windows or mac) while running your dev/code/system on a linux system for example. It also gets you around architecture issues, like if your laptop is arm-based and your app needs x86.

I was initially kinda opposed to this and preferred "bare metal development" on my local rig. But the performance is actually pretty incredible for remote development with vscode such that I don't really notice things are running on different hardware.

We recently had some new members join the team and I decided to spin up some dedicated EC2 instances for them to use for this exact purpose. They aren't being used yet, but as our stack becomes more sophisticated I think workloads will transition there. It's done with a custom terraform module that also provisions other assets needed for each dev (regardless of local or remote dev) like an S3 bucket, some dynamo tables, IAM roles, etc. Being able to onboard a new dev with a handful of lines added to a mapping is pretty awesome.

tl;dr I would absolutely consider remote dev spaces.

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone using cloud dev environments (e.g. Codespaces/Replit) at work?

#13

Post by 0cf8612b2e1e »

tschwimmer wrote: post #5

This is one of these things that I'm shocked there isn't more widepsread uptake on. It seems to win on some of the more important dimensions: ease of use/UX (if executed well), power of machines -> faster iteration time for many workflows, improved priacy. I am not familiar with pricing for many of these offerings and I suspect it probably is pretty expensive. Even at megacorps where they have really good cloud dev e…

I would challenge if the size of the machine or responsiveness of the cloud is superior to local. Most people are not compiling Rust all day, but refreshing JavaScript. Which is to not even bring up the cost difference to rent or own a beefy piece of hardware. 64 gigs of ram is nothing for a local machine, but comes at a cloud premium.

I do think there are some real wins in ensuring development environments are consistent and versioned. Knowing you can pick up the exact version used to develop the project without dedicated effort is attractive.

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone using cloud dev environments (e.g. Codespaces/Replit) at work?

#14

Post by whoomp12341 »

tschwimmer wrote: post #5

This is one of these things that I'm shocked there isn't more widepsread uptake on. It seems to win on some of the more important dimensions: ease of use/UX (if executed well), power of machines -> faster iteration time for many workflows, improved priacy. I am not familiar with pricing for many of these offerings and I suspect it probably is pretty expensive. Even at megacorps where they have really good cloud dev e…

you mean I could transmit my commands at the super fast speed of my internet connection compared to nanoseconds? SIGN ME UP!

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone using cloud dev environments (e.g. Codespaces/Replit) at work?

#15

Post by whoomp12341 »

CodeNest wrote: post #10

We've started integrating Codespaces into our team's workflow. It's been a game-changer for onboarding new devs. No more "works on my machine" issues. The ability to jump into any project without the setup hassle is pretty sweet. We're still ironing out some kinks, but overall, I'm pretty bullish on it for professional use.

isnt that what containers are for?

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone using cloud dev environments (e.g. Codespaces/Replit) at work?

#16

Post by baq »

whoomp12341 wrote: post #15
CodeNest wrote: post #10

We've started integrating Codespaces into our team's workflow. It's been a game-changer for onboarding new devs. No more "works on my machine" issues. The ability to jump into any project without the setup hassle is pretty sweet. We're still ironing out some kinks, but overall, I'm pretty bullish on it for professional use.

isnt that what containers are for?

The file defining the environment is literally called devcontainer.json, so yeah, but it’s not really about that, it’s the service aspect which is the value proposition

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone using cloud dev environments (e.g. Codespaces/Replit) at work?

#17

Post by randomluck040 »

navanchauhan wrote: post #3

Most of the CS classes at my university have moved on to an online Jupyter environment with VS Code preinstalled. It lets students spawn an environment with all the required software for their class preinstalled. E.g. For Computer System it spawns an environment with GDB pre-installed, while for Intro to AI it has PyTorch/Python3 pre-installed

Do you know how that works exactly or do you have a link where I can educate myself on the topic of using Python online in a sort-of-IDE? I‘m teaching Python fundamentals and don’t know how to sail around helping everyone with their individual problems with their machines while installing python or an ide.

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone using cloud dev environments (e.g. Codespaces/Replit) at work?

#18

Post by fswd »

I rent server rack space at a datacenter where I have a beefy workstation to do all my work. I use VS Code Remote and SSH port forwarding. The workstation has fast 2TB NVMe and 64gb of ram, 16 cores and a RTX GPU. It's actually cheaper and faster than our production cloud server.

I tried Github Codespaces and thought it was cool but wasn't nearly as fast as my remote workstation.

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone using cloud dev environments (e.g. Codespaces/Replit) at work?

#19

Post by jlmorton »

For Jetbrains users:

Step 1. Create an Oracle Cloud account Step 2. Create an Ampere 6 core, 32gb memory instance for like $5/mo Step 3. Use Jetbrains Gateway to run your IDE as a thin client, executing on that host.

You get a pretty darn beefy ARM64 VM instance from OCI for extremely cheap. You can get these in a region near you, with low latency. And Jetbrains Gateway works pretty great.

On the plus side, this is an entire VM, so if you've got containers, or whatever else you need to run, that all executes there too.

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone using cloud dev environments (e.g. Codespaces/Replit) at work?

#20

Post by willsmith72 »

tschwimmer wrote: post #5

This is one of these things that I'm shocked there isn't more widepsread uptake on. It seems to win on some of the more important dimensions: ease of use/UX (if executed well), power of machines -> faster iteration time for many workflows, improved priacy. I am not familiar with pricing for many of these offerings and I suspect it probably is pretty expensive. Even at megacorps where they have really good cloud dev e…

The power of machines is less than a 2021+ macbook unless you really pay up for your cloud workspace. Then it's worth the cost if you put the money there instead of towards a good laptop, but people still need some kind of computer.

I get that spinning up a new dev env is really handy, but with something like Ansible it's possible to get a good dev environment on someone's local machine within hours, not much worse.

What am I missing?

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