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

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221–230 of 246 posts

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

#221

We now have an in-house cloud dev environment at Airbnb (note: my opinions are my own and not those of my employer) and it was a huge improvement over what we had in the past. Spinup time is fast, it's easy to use VSCode remotely, and it's easy to have multiple environments for different types of projects (Python, Java, Go, etc.). Neovim + LSP's also works perfectly if you prefer that over VSCode (via ssh)

Would it be possible to see what your CDE looks like?

It's just VSCode running a remote session. It's not a web based IDE.

You can also ssh into the workspace and you can do w/e on the terminal (runs in a k8s container).

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

#222

Director of Product for Codespaces here... AMA

How is the space trending? Who are the biggest adopters (i've seen a lot of use cases in consultancies, education, and "big gnarly stacks")? What are you most excited about?

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

#223
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”.

I've heard some reports that Nix is very painful to get working with Python/ML stack - do you know if this is this still (ever?) the case?

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

#224
post #138
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.

Perhaps you should chat with Alan Cox? IIRC, he was on 28k dialup (over a couple of lines) whilst the more metropolitan of us were on ISDN. Adjust your workflow to your environment.

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

#226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And I can't focus in an office :/

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

#227
Yes! But I work on CodeSandbox, so that creates some bias :). We've been working on our own CDE solution, though we've taken a different spin to improve speed and cost.

Our solution is based on Firecracker, which enables us to "pause" (& clone) a VM at any point in time and resume it later exactly where it left of, within 1.5s. This gives the benefit that you won't have to wait for your environment to spin up when you request one, or when you continue working on one after some inactivity.

However, there's another benefit to that: we can now "preload" development environments. Whenever someone opens a pull request (even from local), we create a VM for it in the background. We run the dev server/LSPs/everything you need, and then pause the VM. Now whenever you want to review that pull request, we resume that environment and you can instantly review the code or check the dev server/preview like a deployment preview.

It also reduces cost. We can pause the VM after 5 minutes of inactivity, and when you come back, we'll resume it so it won't feel like the environment was closed at all. In other solutions you either need to keep a server spinning in the background, or increase the "hibernation timeout" to make sure you don't have the cold boot.

It's kind of like your laptop, if you close it you don't expect it to shut down and boot the whole OS again when you open it. I've written more about how we do the pausing/cloning here (https://codesandbox.io/blog/how-we-clone-a-running-vm-in-2-s...) and here (https://codesandbox.io/blog/cloning-microvms-using-userfault...).

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

#228
post #171
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…

I mean, in codespaces you have scripts that run as the codespace is built. So we basically have s3 buckets with appropriately-sanitized (hopefully) data dumps that the repos copy down and then import into the database.

You can tell codespaces to include the AWS commandline tooling automatically via the devcontainer "features" attributes. And you can tell it to run a script once the codespace has initially been created using the postCreateCommand (which imo is a lot easier to debug than beforeCreate...

For us the s3 credentials live in the github repo as codespace secrets (although I think you could set up a much better auth approach via the vscode aws plugins possibly).

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

#229
post #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

dunno what to tell you, they're a hell of a lot cheaper than the macbook pros and system76 laptops staff used to get.

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

#230
Codespaces user here (I set it up for the teams), for about the last 1.5 years in a large corp setting with teams using it.

My experience with is it has been wonderful for getting started and immediatly becoming productive with very complex systems. Most of those systems have 1 (or very few) experts who need to help everyone else with their setups. When problems arise, and they often do, they've become the bottleneck and Codespaces removes that. Those experts can focus on keeping just that up globally versus locally for each individual.

Outside of that scenario, complex systems, I've experienced it to be overkill. The negatives that come along with using such systems haven't outweight the benefits.

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