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

At work we have very beefy workstations that just aren't available in those hardware specs from cloud vendors. They use workstation grade hardware (A6000 GPU, threadrippers) that offer better performance/price than similarly sized cloud offerings which use datacenter type hardware. To actually tick all same boxes you'd need to go for much larger instance types. Plus it would be questionable whether one could realize the scaling benefit of the cloud because those machines are more pets than cattle, killing them over night and bringing up a clean system the next day would likely upset dozens of different workflows and tweaked setups. And then the software expects network filesystems with low latency random access, not blob storage... They did the cost calculations, buying hardware is cheaper in the long run, including ops.

And then there are customers that have extremely stringent security demands. Segregated networks, video surveillance, no data must leave the premises. Convincing them to move the data into the cloud might not be impossible but it would be a big recertification ordeal for one cloud vendor. And then we'd be locked into that vendor until we could get something else. And we have several such customers.

We have our own custom built cloud dev envs where I work and I def see the value. I don't need to worry about a conflicting version of a dependency that I have installed locally for some prototyping affecting my day-day productivity.

I bet it's hella outdated and full of security issues now though.

Some notes:

- Codespaces uses the devcontainer spec, so folks can use our setup offline if they want

- I get far fewer questions about how to do XYZ, and when I do get questions, I can almost always reproduce them, which is a breath of fresh air

- We do pay a fair chunk to use high CPU/memory machines, this is worth it for us. I have a very lightweight laptop that I use

- Some of our developers like having multiple separate codespaces at a time as a way to separate out different projects. I just use branches, but some folks like the codespace workflow.

- I can run vulnerability scans over our dev environment which is nice

- When I onboard devs, I can get them to the point of running our full application suite in a 15 minute meeting

- I don't have to deal with m1 vs not-m1 issues that were popping up all the time before we made the switch

- Having a linux base is nice, as that's what we use in production. We deal with some annoying dependencies and not having to install them on Mac anymore is nice

- It's seamless changing between my laptop and desktop that I work from. All the code is instantly on the other when I switch, even if I haven't pushed up to git

- Chrome + Notion + Slack + our task tracker app + etc. take up a lot of memory now adays. Even with 32gb machines, folks often would run out of memory trying to run our app. On a codespace, all of the memory is dedicated to just the app.

- With prebuilds, when a developer opens a codespace, we already have all of our python, node, go, etc. dependencies preinstalled (also things like awscli, terraform, pre-commit, VsCode extensions, docker). They just run `aws sso login` and then `start --serve` and things work.

- I live in an RV, and sometimes don't have great internet, but my Codespace is on a remote machine that does always have fast internet. Even being an internet-based service, this works great for me.

The biggest cons:

- Some of our devs were really passionate that they preferred other IDEs than VsCode. Some other IDEs do now have support, but they aren't as supported as VsCode yet

- Codespaces have downtime occasionally (as did Cider at Google). Most folks just use a local copy/devcontainer of the app or do other things when this happens, but some folks choose to always use devcontainers/local copies because this annoys them so much. At Google, we just posted memes when this happened and went home.

- Codespaces become inactive after a controllable amount of time has passed. Some folks don't like the 40 seconds to reactivate a codespace after being inactive for more than 30 minutes, so they either write scripts to keep their codespaces alive or just don't use codespaces at all.

Overall:

- most of our newer employees exclusively use codespaces.

- A few of our older employees who developed locally for years have chosen to continue developing locally, and will just hop into a codespace to run a quick terraform command or something if their local version gives errors.

- The number of questions we deal with regarding issues on a single users' machine have gone down dramatically, and tbh most of the questions come from folks who use the local still

- We do pay a pretty penny for this, but it's a small fraction of our overall cloud spend or costs per employee