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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?

#171

Post by mgbmtl »

robomc wrote: 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…

Any suggestions for a small agency that handles sites with a lot of personal information?

I work in a small shop and things are messy. Similar to having hundreds of WordPress sites, but we managed to standardize the main set of plugins we use on all clients (this has its own git repo), and clients will have their custom theme and some custom plugins (in another repo).

Ideally we would have a tool that lets us spin up a dev site for any client, fetch the production database from the last backup, anonymize the data, connect an IDE and have git commit access.

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

#172

Post by dmantis »

eddtries wrote: post #150
v7n wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I strongly disagree about connectivity being inherently required by software development and therefore an implied part of the job. To take it a step further I believe most developers would benefit from being offline some parts of the day, unless some exceptional circumstances make that unproductive.

That’s ridiculous, you’re conflating productivity (due to slack and meetings, I assume) with fast internet access. You need to install potentially large packages and images, commit code, and be clear in meetings - that’s a minimal standard for software and if someone can’t do that because they’re on some crazy kbps internet then they’re not suitable for the job.

I live in a country with fast enough 5MB/s and huge ping (300ms+) internet. There is no problem with installing packages, downloading deps and so on, but realtime remote typing or gaming could be really clunky.

Don't forget that you don't need a fast ping for development (with local env). "Good internet" is a very broad definition.

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

#173

Post by nicolaslem »

mvdtnz wrote: post #138
k_roy wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No one can guarantee that, at most a remote worker can pick the one (or two if they are lucky) ISPs available to them. Anything beyond that is out of their control.

I have been working fully remote for years from a rural location. My only connection to the Internet is LTE and while it's decent most of the time, there are some days where it's pretty bad.

Luckily my dev environment is local first, which means that a few hours of high packet loss doesn't prevent me from being productive.

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

#174

Post by arjvik »

donmcronald wrote: post #162
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…

> 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?

Spot instances actually make this manageably cheap!

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

#175

Post by JCharante »

mvdtnz wrote: post #138
k_roy wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Remote Async means not everybody has a good connection 24/7. Not every position requires being online immediately if it’s not prescheduled. Picture someone doing Van Life across the US with friends. They know they need to get to a Starbucks for the 10am meeting and be at a truck stop for a meeting at 5, but outside those time periods developing locally and having slack for text chat on a spotty connection should be good enough.

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

#176

Post by traceroute66 »

dehrmann wrote: post #145
paxys wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SSH used to work perfectly fine over 28.8 kbps modems. You don't really need a stellar connection for remote coding. If your internet is capable enough for a video call it can run a hundred remote IDEs side by side.

It doesn't work perfectly fine over in-flight wifi.

> It doesn't work perfectly fine over in-flight wifi.

I would hazard a guess that the main problem with in-flight wifi is that it is going to DPI'd beyond recognition.

So you're never going to know what is "real" packet loss and what is the DPI saying "computer says no".

The Sandvine/Procera[1] system that many (most ?) airlines use is an ML-based DPI that looks at absolutely everything in an effort to correlate obfuscated traffic to the actual flow. IIRC they claim 98% accuracy.

[1] https://www.sandvine.com/

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

#177

Post by yunohn »

donmcronald wrote: post #162
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…

> 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?

How is buying a your dev a single top of the line expensive 64GB RAM MacBook equivalent to on-demand EC2 instances?

Despite containers working locally, the ease of having a remote image with everything preinstalled is huge. Lots of large companies offer internal dev cloud environments - I’ve always found it to be a frictionless experience versus local setup at other companies.

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

#178

Post by traceroute66 »

esafak wrote: post #71
0cf8612b2e1e wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 consi…

> 64 gigs of ram is nothing for a local machine It's not nothing. Most developers are issued laptops, and a 64GB Macbook costs over $3000. Plus a CDE can be shared.

> Most developers are issued laptops, and a 64GB Macbook costs over $3000.

This is unfortunatley a nonsensical argument.

As a company, you are employing a developer to write code. Both the company and the developer are happy when they are at their most productive. And to that extent, a $3,000 laptop is a perfectly reasonable "tool of the trade". Also don't forget companies can lease laptops if they don't have the cash floating around.

Its the same thing in other sectors.

For example, in Finance. A Bloomberg terminal comes in at $30,000 a year. But if you are, for example, a bond trader putting in multiple 6,7 or 8 figure orders on the market every day, then its no secret that Bloomberg has the monopoly on bond data and as a bond trader you absolutely need access to one as the tool of your trade.

In addition, following COVID, most sensible companies have embraced WFH. And so what the company saves on office space they can spend on other things such as better laptops for developers.

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

#179

Post by hiAndrewQuinn »

thinkmassive wrote: post #125

My computing environment mostly consists of a browser and tmux, with vim for editing. A few months ago I wanted to try Github Copilot, so I signed up for the trial thinking I could use it in Codespaces. Eventually I gave up and installed VSCode locally. Now I use it a little, mostly for exploratory work, but less than I would if it were in my browser. Is there any CDE with good Copilot (or equivalent) integration ava…

If you happen to be running Ubuntu, or are willing to run an Ubuntu VM, the 3 scripts and instructions I have over at [1] should be enough to get you a working Neovim instance with the LazyVim "distro", which itself has built in Copilot support. And a lot of other command line niceties too!

I've been told it's fairly easy to tweak and run in Debian too. I basically wrote this for those times where I want a fresh development box but I'm too lazy or computationally cheap to even bother installing Ansible to run a `host: localhost` self-configuration playbook on.

[1]: https://github.com/hiAndrewQuinn/shell-bling-ubuntu

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

#180

Post by Develo-Luke »

We use Gitpod (https://gitpod.io/) for our eCommerce Magento development tasks across all of our projects at Develo (https://www.develodesign.co.uk).

This gives our support developers instant access to a fully configured development environment across all of our client sites, it really helps speed things up, previously there would be a min of 1-2hrs local setup for a new developer to work on a project, now it's 5 mins and guaranteed no problems getting going. So we can spread support developers across more projects and not worry about local setup. I put together a free starter repo if anyone wants to try that for Magento dev https://github.com/develodesign/magento-gitpod

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