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Ask HN: Is anyone using cloud dev environments (e.g. Codespaces/Replit) at work?
201–210 of 246 posts
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone using cloud dev environments (e.g. Codespaces/Replit) at work?
#202We 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?
We actually moved away from containers for dev purposes for almost all of our apps, though many teams still use them. Mainly because they are a bad developer experience. We invested in making apps run consistently in a native way.
Bento was actually our first attempt at doing all of this on our local MacBooks. Many users found that their machine would slow to a crawl and heat up. M1 Macs and now OrbStack instead of Docker Desktop help reduce that. Moving off of docker helped as well. Ec2 gives us the consistent image that is easily testable and repeatable. Egress costs here are negligible.
We dont' keep the machine running all of the time. It stays up running during the users work hours (~8 hours) and then hibernates (the machine is off but memory persisted) which reduces EC2 costs (minus EBS) to zero. We detect activity on their laptop and then wake it when needed.
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone using cloud dev environments (e.g. Codespaces/Replit) at work?
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Suppose you’re building a feature that requires $newlib as a dependency. How is that handled? Do you request the addition of $newlib and wait for a new remote image to be deployed for everyone before you can work on your feature branch?
IME these remote instances come with sudo rights, and one is free to install/configure as they please. The initial image can be chosen too.
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone using cloud dev environments (e.g. Codespaces/Replit) at work?
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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!
We don’t use spot because they can be yanked away easily. Savings plans and hibernation are the biggest cost savers.
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone using cloud dev environments (e.g. Codespaces/Replit) at work?
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
Suppose you’re building a feature that requires $newlib as a dependency. How is that handled? Do you request the addition of $newlib and wait for a new remote image to be deployed for everyone before you can work on your feature branch?
IME these remote instances come with sudo rights, and one is free to install/configure as they please. The initial image can be chosen too.
Right. The devs have full sudo access. They can install and configure whatever they want. Our Bento tool has pre/post setup hooks for all services. So teams can automate this. When something is commonly used we just preinstall it for them. Or some just contribute to the repo. It is all fairly straight forward Ansible and shell scripts. We push nightly to everyone's existing machines.
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone using cloud dev environments (e.g. Codespaces/Replit) at work?
#206We're not, and I'm very glad for it. I am the opposite of excited about the idea of CDEs.
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone using cloud dev environments (e.g. Codespaces/Replit) at work?
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
Would not using one of the selfhosted CDE solution make it even easier?
Kind of, I used to run code server but you miss out on plug-ins and other custom settings. Connecting via SSH is seamless. You can copy from local -> remote, keep your plug-ins and access from any machine with VS Code.
What if it was as seamless but also managed everything for you. Can send you a link to try it out if you like?
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone using cloud dev environments (e.g. Codespaces/Replit) at work?
#208I'll repost here a comment I made on another HN post about cloud dev environments and why I will never be convinced to use them. > I have never in my career seen a good implementation of cloud development. At every company I've ever worked for, "cloud development" is nothing but a Linux VM that gets provisioned for you in AWS, a file watcher that syncs your local files to the VM, and some extra CLI tools to run build…
I have been building them my entire career and there should be no sync involved at all tbh.
Everything is remote but you work in a local IDE and everything feels local
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone using cloud dev environments (e.g. Codespaces/Replit) at work?
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Over the past decade I'd reckon 1/4 of my productive output has been whilst sitting on some type of conveyance. Some of the intervals in that period have stretched from 6mo to 1.5 year where >50% is while commuting or otherwise traveling. Honestly, I'm either on the clock or off, and I have better things to do with my time than look out a window when I'm not being paid.
I genuinely envy your ability to do this. I find that it's simply impossible for me to engage in any meaningful work during commutes. I can't focus.
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone using cloud dev environments (e.g. Codespaces/Replit) at work?
#210I'll repost here a comment I made on another HN post about cloud dev environments and why I will never be convinced to use them. > I have never in my career seen a good implementation of cloud development. At every company I've ever worked for, "cloud development" is nothing but a Linux VM that gets provisioned for you in AWS, a file watcher that syncs your local files to the VM, and some extra CLI tools to run build…
With VS Code remote SSH, there is no "local" you are always on the server so there is also no syncing. They do some tricks to make this seamless and perform and feel as if everything was local.
But what do you do when you need to work without internet access, or with limited internet access?