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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?

#81

Post by paxys »

Plenty of large companies are using them (I'm talking Google/FB/Microsoft and the like). You may not have heard of it because they run these systems in-house vs using a commercial service.

My company switched to 100% remote dev envs a couple years ago. When you cut a branch it spins up a VM and you can connect to it from VS Code (native or browser based) or just plain SSH. It works great. The lag is not noticeable at all. Dev envs are fully provisioned and up to date with all tooling and dependencies so you don't need to bother with managing any of it locally. Given a choice I don't think any dev at my company would go back.

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

#82

Post by navanchauhan »

zo1 wrote: post #48
navanchauhan wrote: post #3

Most 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

Having more grads coming out of university unprepared and expecting even more handholding (this time in the form of devcontainers in the cloud preconfigured and "ready", etc) really does not bode well for the health of our industry long term.

The situation is pretty bad. Some students don’t know how to Google properly because they know they can always reach out to TAs/CAs during office hours

But at the same time if everyone moves to devcontainers, will this skill even matter for the most part? Because the people who want to learn how to do something are going to do it regardless, and those who don’t might not need to worry about it

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

#83

Post by carlio »

paxys wrote: post #81

Plenty of large companies are using them (I'm talking Google/FB/Microsoft and the like). You may not have heard of it because they run these systems in-house vs using a commercial service. My company switched to 100% remote dev envs a couple years ago. When you cut a branch it spins up a VM and you can connect to it from VS Code (native or browser based) or just plain SSH. It works great. The lag is not noticeable at…

I think you're talking about spinning up a temporary environment running the code and connecting via a local IDE to inspect it, whereas OP is talking about hosting the IDE remotely.

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

#84

Post by devmor »

My previous employer used them to test client integrations of our hosted services. They were nice to send a url for collaborative debugging rather than telling someone to go spin up a copy of the SDK and pasting them a block of json to configure it with.

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

#85

Post by tripdout »

nickstinemates wrote: post #61
fswd wrote: post #18

I 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.

Beefy HEDT/workstation with ssh running are amazing dev environments. Vscode remote ssh or even vim make it a dream.

Too bad Intellij requires the Ultimate version of their software to use their equivalent of the VScode server/client feature.

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

#86

Post by shelled »

As an Android develop this greatly interests me. In fact this was one of the reasons I had to buy a more powerful laptop than I wanted to and it almost cost me double my target laptop otherwise. Because Android development is such a resource hog.

Are there useful cloud dev env setups for Android? The way Google has made sure Android dev remains locked in to Android Studio i.e IntelliJ Idea and also to the Great Gradle and what not I assume it’d have to come from IntelliJ - https://www.jetbrains.com/remote-development/.

Has anyone successfully tried this for Android remote dev? I suspect even if it’s feasible with lots of fragile moving parts the resource hungry setup will surely make it very costly for having a personal setup in the cloud.

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

#87

Post by tripdout »

metadat wrote: post #26
rconti wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fracti…

Intellij Ultimate edition costs more than the server at this point. Wish they'd bring this over to Community and Android Studio.

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

#88

Post by tripdout »

sensanaty wrote: post #67

Sorta, I have a beefy PC at home and I use Parsec to just stream my screens to my laptop if I'm at the office or whatever. Not quite the same since it's not really containerized, but I set up the project once and then I'm good to go from there It's nice cause I detest Apple/MacOS and this lets me avoid it completely since I'm just interacting with a Debian machine

I thought Parsec didn't have a Linux host application?

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

#89

Post by upbeat_general »

tripdout wrote: post #85
nickstinemates wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Beefy HEDT/workstation with ssh running are amazing dev environments. Vscode remote ssh or even vim make it a dream.

Too bad Intellij requires the Ultimate version of their software to use their equivalent of the VScode server/client feature.

Don’t worry about the price. It’s absolute crap. [At least PyCharm remote is and I believe it has the same underlying Jetbrains architecture]

Windows randomly quit, take forever to open, there are always indexing issues, etc. Locally everything is great, but remote is completely unstable.

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

#90

Post by zemnmez »

carlio wrote: post #83
paxys wrote: post #81

Plenty of large companies are using them (I'm talking Google/FB/Microsoft and the like). You may not have heard of it because they run these systems in-house vs using a commercial service. My company switched to 100% remote dev envs a couple years ago. When you cut a branch it spins up a VM and you can connect to it from VS Code (native or browser based) or just plain SSH. It works great. The lag is not noticeable at…

I think you're talking about spinning up a temporary environment running the code and connecting via a local IDE to inspect it, whereas OP is talking about hosting the IDE remotely.

No, Google actually runs a remote web IDE called Cider. The latest version is derived from VSCode.
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