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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?

#131

Post by mdeeks »

We at Instacart use them heavily. It is a system my team built called Bento Remote ("Bento" is a local orchestration tool we previously built). We built Bento Remote ourselves because Codespaces was in its infancy at the time and really couldn't meet our needs for things like pre-built images, preserved disks, warm pools, live patching, and being behind our firewall. Bento Remote was and is hugely successful and likely one of the largest boosts to developer productivity in our history.

With Bento Remote get a fresh new fully dedicated EC2 machine in about two minutes from when you run `bento remote create`. It is continuously tested on every merge and verified to function. Everything you need is preinstalled and ready to go. Just connect VSCode to it and start coding. No futzing around getting your local environment to work. Break something on your Bento Remote? Throw it away and get a new machine. Switching projects? Grab a new machine from the pool that is preconfigured for that project. Your settings travel with you.

We had a potentially unique set of circumstances though. Our full stack development requirements were VERY high and needed 64GB to even run our largest and most active apps. This made other 3rd party tools fantastically expensive. Building it ourselves let us fit instacart specific needs and workflows. As well as do clever things like hibernating the EC2 instance after hours when the users laptop is idle. This plus a host of other measures were essential to making this not only cost effective but a large net gain.

So I highly recommend everyone at least take a look and evaluate if you have the need. Start with the SaaS versions and see.

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

#132

Post by nurple »

revscat wrote: post #29

It is interesting that in the comments on this thread I’m not seeing any mention of nix, which is arguably overlapping the topic at hand with the Venn diagram of “spinning up dev environments”.

Love NixOS. Flakes are awesome and I've started playing with flake-parts+devenv. It's been far easier and faster to set up isolated environments(nothing installed globally) than docker compose, that and it's substantially more performant (especially on non-Linux OSs). I've also found of the container route that you usually still need to set yourself up locally for most of the tooling or have a fairly complicated set of images for different use cases and/or set it up with the complexity of a full OS anyway.

Started a new job recently and had my laptop up and running, ready to code in about an hour (only second nix box I've brought up), by day 3 I was building and running the main monolith monorepo with my own local flake. I have since replaced redis, postgres, and two ancillary services in containers with devenv services/processes; it's been really great not dealing with docker volumes, networks, images or building containers and managing pruning them.

It would be interesting to play with automating deployment of my nixos machine configuration into a cloud VM or pod as I work 99% CLI anyway, but I just don't really see the need... this is just easier.

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

#134

Post by [deleted] »

randomluck040 wrote: post #17
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.

[deleted]

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

#135

Post by clhodapp »

orsenthil wrote: post #100
roland35 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks like 4 cores and 24 GB fit inside the free tier: https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/

It is funny they call it "Always Free".

Either they are aping from Google Cloud or Thomas Kurian brought some Oracle phrases with him to Google, since GCP also calls it that (or at least they used to).

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

#136

Post by istarial »

mdeeks wrote: post #131

We at Instacart use them heavily. It is a system my team built called Bento Remote ("Bento" is a local orchestration tool we previously built). We built Bento Remote ourselves because Codespaces was in its infancy at the time and really couldn't meet our needs for things like pre-built images, preserved disks, warm pools, live patching, and being behind our firewall. Bento Remote was and is hugely successful and like…

Wow - it sounds so simple. Will read more about this (hopefully on the Instacart blog if it exists there!)

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

#137

Post by 8organicbits »

naikrovek wrote: post #119
jkaplowitz wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn’t help when you truly don’t have WAN connectivity. Imagine working on an airplane where the wifi is unusable or unavailable, or working during a long NYC subway ride (where even mobile data connectivity between stations is only occasionally and transiently available in the underground segments of the system).

why would you be working while sitting on some type of conveyance? doing things like that will not get you any rewards which compare to the effort you've spent. look out a window, I say.

I used to do code reviews and catch up on email on my phone while on the train. It let me leave the office sooner. The metro runs underground, so there's nothing out the window to see.

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

#138

Post by mvdtnz »

k_roy wrote: post #91
paxys wrote: post #81

Plenty of large companies are using them (I'm talking Google/FB/Microsoft and the like). You may not have heard of it because they run these systems in-house vs using a commercial service. My company switched to 100% remote dev envs a couple years ago. When you cut a branch it spins up a VM and you can connect to it from VS Code (native or browser based) or just plain SSH. It works great. The lag is not noticeable at…

Curious what you do for the people on less-than-good internet connections? Or is everybody just onsite with a business-class SLA?

This is software development. I wouldn't hire someone (remotely) who couldn't guarantee that they're on a good connection. It's part of the job.

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

#139

Post by PH95VuimJjqBqy »

HDThoreaun wrote: post #94
zo1 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having more grads coming out of university unprepared and expecting even more handholding (this time in the form of devcontainers in the cloud preconfigured and "ready", etc) really does not bode well for the health of our industry long term.

Yes but seems like most companies are moving to this remote dev container environment that you ssh into. Obviously the google skills are still important but there are plenty of other, more interesting, problems you can use to practice that.

I don't think that's even remotely true, I think you're in a bubble.
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