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Cloud desktops aren't as good as you'd think

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Re: Cloud desktops aren't as good as you'd think

#251

Post by brundolf »

GiorgioG wrote: post #29
simfoo wrote: post #13

Nothing beats working directly on a fast but quiet workstation sitting next to my table. At least for me, the productivity gains associated with quicker builds, IDE resyncs (CLion, looking at you) or just being able to have email, chat, calendar and an active video conference running without making the system crawl to a halt or long latency spikes are huge. 3-4k for a machine that will likely last 2-3 years is nothin…

For the life of me I don’t understand why folks default to laptops for development. Yes portability is great, but most of us park our behinds at the same desk everyday. If I’m going to be out of the office (away from home) I take a laptop and remote into the desktop! Even M1 macs (I have one and love it), while powerful, just can’t hold a candle to a workstation class machine.

It depends what you're doing. For a normal web dev workflow, I have yet to see my M1 MBP be anything but flawlessly responsive. I'm sure there are other workloads where it's different

Re: Cloud desktops aren't as good as you'd think

#252

Post by jasonlotito »

hasel wrote: post #160
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #69

With cloud gaming you can stream 4K games at 60FPS, with clarity and quality for fast moving objects. Why does remote desktop still shit itself when I move around MS Word with a few pictures? I know a tier 1 financial company that offer 100k / year developers a slow VM and from there you have to log into another VM. The VMs are dual core, 8GB. I watch in horror as each keypress takes more than a second. The amount of…

What’s the input latency like in those cloud games?

Not the OP, but i know for something like PlayStation Now, it was acceptable for most games. It was a pleasure to just decide to play a game and well yeah, I was playing the game. The latency wasn't a concern.

I couldn't see myself playing an FPS on it, but then I prefer kb/m anyways. But for the games I play on console? It was fine.

There can still be issues, of course, but the latency overall wasn't a deterrent.

Re: Cloud desktops aren't as good as you'd think

#253

Post by caycep »

destroy-2A wrote: post #31

Try working in banking for 20 years, stuck behind at least 1 layer of citrix living in citrix inception. Latency for every keystroke, your brain starts to add latency to latency that is not there to compensate for a life lived wearing citrix latency goggles.

Or healthcare.....

Re: Cloud desktops aren't as good as you'd think

#254

Post by hirvi74 »

just_boost_it wrote: post #39
destroy-2A wrote: post #31

Try working in banking for 20 years, stuck behind at least 1 layer of citrix living in citrix inception. Latency for every keystroke, your brain starts to add latency to latency that is not there to compensate for a life lived wearing citrix latency goggles.

I quit a job because of citrix. Exactly like you said, very noticeable latency. It ate into my productivity as a part of my mental energy was going into waiting for feedback to my actions to appear on screen.

> part of my mental energy was going into waiting for feedback to my actions to appear on screen.

Sounds like my life as a developer too. =D

Re: Cloud desktops aren't as good as you'd think

#255

Post by groovybits »

NotHereNotThere wrote: post #248
hasel wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s the input latency like in those cloud games?

From a former Stadia user; latency was never an issue or noticeable with a 4K stream. And I've played quite a bit of fast paced shooters in the platform. The experience is extremely dependent on location, bandwidth, local setup and availability of close services (in my case, the closest DC was <15ms away according to Stadia telemetry).

I've been a Shadow PC [0] user on and off for the past few years. The performance was very good, granted I have a 1 gigabit Internet connection.

0: https://shadow.tech

Re: Cloud desktops aren't as good as you'd think

#256

Post by acdha »

zmgsabst wrote: post #241
selykg wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm the IT guy for a new non-profit. We aren't separated yet from the company that created us, but we're in the process of separating. I get to decide all this fun stuff. I had a very brief talk with the IT team for the larger parent company when I started and explained this stupid password rotation thing, as I came from a security background, they wanted nothing of it. Set in their ways. For the new non-profit that…

NIST agrees, as if their update a few years ago. > Verifiers SHOULD NOT require memorized secrets to be changed arbitrarily (e.g., periodically). However, verifiers SHALL force a change if there is evidence of compromise of the authenticator. https://pages.nist.gov/800-63-3/sp800-63b.html#memsecret

This is a really useful thing to keep in mind because even if you aren't directly bound by a requirement to follow the NIST standards, being able to point your policy people at that is handy if you can shift the conversation to “bring our policy in line with NIST” where there's a question about whether they'll later look bad for _not_ having done so. Typically these conversations are driven by risk aversion and things like federal standards help balance that perspective.

Re: Cloud desktops aren't as good as you'd think

#257

Post by thfuran »

itintheory wrote: post #228
senko wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd love to do that, but my laptop's and workstation's state inevitably get out of sync leading up to "wait why doesn't this work ... spend a couple of minutes .. ah yes I did X on the other device". (Before someone suggest "use docker": then I'd need a more powerful workstation and laptop :-) And VNCing into my workstation from the laptop has all the drawbacks that Matthew described in the article.

> (Before someone suggest "use docker": then I'd need a more powerful workstation and laptop :-) Why do you believe that to be the case? Docker performance overhead is so minimal I highly doubt you'd be able to tell any difference compared to native processes.

Isn't it a full vm on Macs?

Re: Cloud desktops aren't as good as you'd think

#258

Post by acdha »

icedchai wrote: post #172
jiggawatts wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was a "Citrix consultant" for about two decades. I'd walk into customer sites for the first time, meet people, and within minutes they would start ranting about how bad Citrix is. I suspect only dentists get this kind of feedback from customers before a procedure. Having said that, 99% of the time the problem boils down to this: The guy (and it is a guy) signing the cheques either doesn't use Citrix OR uses it from…

How long ago was this? 4 megabits would be pretty good... back in 1998!

This _very_ much depended on where you are. I had symmetric 10Mbps at home in 1998 but when we moved to New Haven in 2008 Verizon couldn't deliver more than ISDN / T1 to large chunks the city (we literally could have used a WiFi antenna to hit their regional headquarters, too). There's so much deferred maintenance around the world.

Re: Cloud desktops aren't as good as you'd think

#259

Post by aleksiy123 »

I would have agreed until I started working at Google. Also, you should completely avoid having Remote Desktop and instead use ssh + an editor that works with remote files.

At Google we have a custom fork of VSCode running in browser and builds can either be distributed or run on my Linux VM to utilize build cache.

I liked it so much I started doing a similar setup for small side projects. Just boot up the Cloud Console on GCP and start coding.

Advantages are:

- Accessible from anywhere (I use my pc, my laptop, etc. The env is always the same)

- More compute (I can attach more CPU + more RAM flexibly)

- Less friction to start (minimum environment setup, most tools are preinstalled)

- Datacenter Network speeds + Artifacts cached (installing dependencies is fast)

Disadvantages:

- network dependence

There are some adjustments that need to be made to your workflow. And for some applications you are dependent on having the correct tooling. However, my personal prediction is most companies will move to this type of development workflow as the tooling improves.

Re: Cloud desktops aren't as good as you'd think

#260

Post by kfajdsl »

aleksiy123 wrote: post #259

I would have agreed until I started working at Google. Also, you should completely avoid having Remote Desktop and instead use ssh + an editor that works with remote files. At Google we have a custom fork of VSCode running in browser and builds can either be distributed or run on my Linux VM to utilize build cache. I liked it so much I started doing a similar setup for small side projects. Just boot up the Cloud Cons…

This is exactly the alternative that was presented at the end of the post. He was specifically against remote desktops.
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