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Ask HN: Is anyone using cloud dev environments (e.g. Codespaces/Replit) at work?
21–30 of 246 posts
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone using cloud dev environments (e.g. Codespaces/Replit) at work?
#22I 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.
What's the advantage of having the workstation at a datacenter in this context?
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone using cloud dev environments (e.g. Codespaces/Replit) at work?
#23I have not used a full blown online environment. Except maybe VSCode remote using SSH. I repeatedly find anything that requires a network call somewhere in between a serious impediment disrupting the flow of development. Sometimes I find myself in slow laggy situations with ssh to the point I prefer Mobile Shell mosh. VSCode remote (or similar) via ssh obviously becomes painful.
Most cloud environments are also limited in terms of what you can do. e.g: issue sudo while running a process, attach to a process with a debugger.
Usually when these come development environment ready, it also hides away underlying details - i.e, I no longer know the command line etc to should I need to write infrastructure code/automation later on.
I guess there are domains where these are non-issues. But for a wide variety of my use-cases local development is going to be preferable, because by design there are limitations in the alternative.
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone using cloud dev environments (e.g. Codespaces/Replit) at work?
#24I considered it but the cost seemed pretty steep - up to ~$30/day/dev for codespaces. I didn't think local development was close to broken enough to justify it.
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone using cloud dev environments (e.g. Codespaces/Replit) at work?
#25I got a cheap Hetzner Auction server for all the work needs https://www.hetzner.com/sb . I use VS Code remote to work there. It's easier and more convenient than Codespaces (and I think cheaper). Has a lot of benefits like instantly sharing a web server with the outside world, ability to run my servers and bots continuously, ability to work from different computers seamlessly. It also functions in many random ways (e.g. as my Anki backup server)
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone using cloud dev environments (e.g. Codespaces/Replit) at work?
#26I 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.
What's the advantage of having the workstation at a datacenter in this context?
$60/yr vs thousands of $ upfront for a comparable desktop or notebook machine.
Not to mention the superior network connectivity (10 gigabit/s). In fact, there are no 10gbps options from the common last mile carriers available at any price (AT&T, Crapcast). And if they did offer it, it'd probably be $500USD/mo+ just for Internet.
AT&T has a 5gbps fiber plan available for $250USD+/mo, but there are very few (>10 fractional portions of cities nationally) areas where it is offered today.
If you have a strong enough desire for cost-effective, really fucking fast Internet for a fair price, move to Korea. In .kr you can get 10gig for something like $30-50USD/mo.
Edit: Oops, my bad. I meant to reply to this comment:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37934982.
> 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.
We use OCI, aka Oracle Cloud. As a customer, OCI is more financially appealing compared to the competition (AWS, Azure) for bare compute infra. Not as cheap as OVH, if that fits your requirements. For me though, OCI is preferred because it provides all the standard cloud building blocks of multi-region + (cheap) object storage + block storage.
I mean, fuck Oracle and Larry Ellison, right? That said, building and operating a cloud at scale is a lot of work and I'll leverage their work as long as it makes fiscal sense.
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone using cloud dev environments (e.g. Codespaces/Replit) at work?
#27Most 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.
I'll bet they're using this, that's exactly what it is designed for:
https://tljh.jupyter.org/en/latest/
Alternatively, you could do something similar with Google Colab and a notebook you make to serve as a template.
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone using cloud dev environments (e.g. Codespaces/Replit) at work?
#28We use remote dev VMs with VS Code connected via SSH. It works a treat for a small team working on microservices. You can work from any machine while everyone has their own user account. Sharing code is a breeze. It's easy to test APIs in development (no http tunneling). Deploying to a local (on the VM) docker host for longer running services in test works well and it's super cheap to run.
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone using cloud dev environments (e.g. Codespaces/Replit) at work?
#29It 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”.
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone using cloud dev environments (e.g. Codespaces/Replit) at work?
#30We'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.
Nice, thanks! what kind of team are you on (company size, how experienced the engineers, tech stack)? when you say "ironing out some kinks" what were the pain points?
if you're up for quick chat/DM, would love to hear more (link in profile)