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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?

#161
post #91
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?

Swear a lot. Last week I spent the day co-working with a bunch of contractors from the same agency/consultancy. Lovely location (an old pump house by a stream), great food, seats, tables etc except the wifi was awful.

I brought an old under-powered Macbook I had not used for a year or two, but I was going to use codespaces so no problem to run the entire stack. I thought. Codespaces works great from my home office PC...

Constant disconnection meant I eventually gave up on codespaces to directly work on my machine, but then had to try to download the world (brew update, git cloning, a new JVM version, docker images, all new SBT and Scala binaries, transitive dependencies, etc). Granted I caused it by not pre-downloading a more up-to-date dev environment but I was not planning on using it locally. :/

Scraping nails on a school blackboard painful hours later I mostly only did theoretical changes, and spent most of the time chatting/networking.

What we did agree was to put in an offer to the co-working space to set up a decent mesh wifi that can handle lots of people downloading all of maven, using devcontainers, zooming etc. So that we can come back.

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

#162
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…

> 64GB

The cheapest instance I could find approached $1k USD per year without egress costs. If you can build all of that, why use EC2 over your own hardware? If you’re spinning up containers, why not use the dev’s workstation for that? You already paid for it, right?

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

#163
post #153
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.

Sounds like normal progress. The bulk of the next generation will operate on a higher level abstraction that affords them more productivity with some of them specializing in the lower level stuff that used to be part and parcel of normal SWE duties but is now basement-dweller neckbeard voodoo. Grandpa complained that nobody knows how to set points ignition and jet the carburetor anymore, dad complains that you can't…

I lived on a boat with a 1972 Atomic 4. I had to set the points and jet the carb every so often. I truly enjoyed working on that thing. My car needed a freaking mechanic with a computer. It was nice to hear it start chugging incorrectly, pop the cover off, measure a few things, then start it back up. No technology required, just well timed explosions.

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

#167
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…

> 64GB The cheapest instance I could find approached $1k USD per year without egress costs. If you can build all of that, why use EC2 over your own hardware? If you’re spinning up containers, why not use the dev’s workstation for that? You already paid for it, right?

It sounds like the number of instances needed fluctuates heavily, maybe max number of concurrent instances needed in a month is ~500 64GB instances while average could be ~100 instances?

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

#168
post #56

We are an agency where you might flip between working on several completely different projects in a week, and for us it's extremely useful. We'd had all our sites set up to run fairly easily via docker compose prior, but I'd still find myself debugging people's setups fairly frequently. And giving developers data and secrets was often either insecure or complicated, depending on the codebase. With codespaces, people…

> which has meant we can move everyone to fairly cheap macbook airs

> fairly cheap macbook airs

what did I just read

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

#169

At Coherence (withcoherence.com) we are building a slightly different twist on this where one configuration can drive different environments across the SDLC - Cloud IDE for dev, full-stack branch previews, CI/CD, staging/qa/UAT, production - with deployments in your own AWS/GCP account. We generally see a ton of velocity increase in dev from teams that adopt the Cloud IDE alongside the rest, as exhibited by lots of c…

I can't tell you how frustrating it is to see new cloud IDEs come up that don't adopt the containers.dev standard. It's published, it's open, please don't NIH this. Devpod did this right. Gitpod is actively working on supporting it. No I one hundred percent do not want to use your coherence.yml files instead.

When we did our thing our starting position was support for devcontainer after evaluating all options. But we are working on supporting devfile soon.

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

#170
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”.

A colleague wrote this comparison of available “standards” just recently https://www.daytona.io/dotfiles/mastering-development-enviro...
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