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

mjg59.dreamwidth.org

271–280 of 479 posts

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

#271
> Modern IDEs tend to support SSHing out to remote hosts to perform builds there, so as long as you're ok with source code being visible on laptops you can at least shift the "I need a workstation with a bunch of CPU" problem out to the cloud.

JetBrains has Gateway[1] and VSCode has remote Dev tools[2]

Gateway's performance is very dependent on the network connectivity. If you have bad ping, you're going to curse the world seeing the input delay.

VSCode seems to be caching the files locally and updating them separately. With bad internet, you still get the native input lag.

[1] https://www.jetbrains.com/remote-development/gateway

[2] https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/ssh

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

#272

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.

Somehow I missed it at the end. However, he mentions the code still being present on the local env and only doing builds in the cloud.

I'm more in the camp of the code living in the cloud, building in the cloud, executing in the cloud.

You're editor running locally providing a view of the code. Which requires some specific tooling.

As always theres a sliding scale here and people need to decide what works best for their use case.

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

#273
post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree in general but I do blame Citrix for some foot-guns. The Citrix admins at my employer have never figured out how to configure it to get keyboard latency below ~120ms (on a gigabit LAN), and the silly health meter always reports the connection as excellent. This is mostly on them - in classic enterprise IT thinking, if it’s not down your job is done - but I’m somewhat disappointed that it’s even possible to co…

A 120ms should feel immediate. IIRC anything under 300ms feels instant.

That was a bad post. The figure of 300ms was from memory. I guess it's complex but for games shmup games (https://www.pubnub.com/blog/how-fast-is-realtime-human-perce...):

"

...for Massive Multiplayer Online Gaming (MMOG), real-time is a requirement.

As online gaming matures, players flock to games with more immersive and lifelike experiences. To satisfy this demand, developers now need to produce games with very realistic environments that have very strict data stream latency requirements:

    300ms  target performance
    13ms    > lower detectable limit
"

But this is real-time gaming. Typing should be less demanding, I'd think.

Edit: also https://stackoverflow.com/questions/536300/what-is-the-short...

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

#274
post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jetbrains has support for remote development environments. I haven't tried it myself, but it looks promising. https://www.jetbrains.com/remote-development/

I can confirm that using JetBrains Gateway to run IntelliJ is more pleasant than using Chrome Remote Desktop, X11 forwarding, JetBrains projector, or Xpra.

Except it's still buggy like hell.

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

#275
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. Once you edit the xrdp.ini file to enable the Xorg backend (which I've done recently on Fedora 36 and Ubuntu LTS), you're good. Multiple screen support depends on your client, I've had no issues with Windows and Mac clients. Audio depends a lot on your server distro (clients have it all sorted). Fedora uses pipewire, so YMMV. When using mobile connections I trim it down to 16-bit color and it is perfectly usable…

I had to switch back to Pulseaudio and compile the audio plugin for XRDP myself (that was on Fedora 35).

You're probably right about that. My Fedora container is 36 upgraded from 35, so I might have done that a while back and never looked back.

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

#276
post #105
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a European, I find this befuddling. A union employee of whom?

Doesn't matter who's paying them as long as they're union. There are certain things you just can't yourself.

Back when I worked for $MEGACORP, we wanted to mount some monitors to the wall in the infosec space for Big Cool Dashboards. The quoted price from the union contractors that had a lock on all HQ building modifications was frightfully high (five figures to just mount some TVs). They spec'd asbestos inspectors for a space that had been certified asbestos-free, had safety observers that had to stand around and be sure the 'job site' was safe, etc.

We went and just bought rolling stands instead. We thought about sneaking the Best Buy techs in but decided we liked our jobs too much to do that. When they found out we just bought stands instead of having the screens mounted they tried to throw a hissy fit but were unsuccessful (we didn't actually break any rules).

This same job required me to get an exemption from two unions because the devices I worked with communicated with RF energy (radio union) and I needed a screwdriver to get inside of them (IBEW). Sigh. It didn't matter than the wire techs down the hall from me didn't know JTAG from JPEG — I couldn't risk getting a grievance because someone thought I, a mere unrepresented member of "management" (as everyone who wasn't union-represented was called), was takin' their jerbs.

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

#277
Using a third-party cloud only ensures that all work scenarios enjoy the same lowest-common denominator.

My preference is to select one of the work contexts (e.g., the office) as primary and to put a workstation there, then remote to that workstation from secondary contexts (e.g., at home). This configuration gives me first-class computing where I need it most, in the primary context, and a decent second-class option when I need to work in other contexts.

I happily worked with this configuration for more than a decade and found it served all of my local and remote needs.

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

#278
All these dev-machines-in-a-cloud sound wonderful from a security, compliance, and onboarding perspective. What is often forgotten is that this is now a service you’re operating and a massive SPOF. If it goes down (and it will), productivity drops to exactly zero. It’s like sending your devs home until it’s fixed.

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

#279

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…

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

This is a feature in search of a problem for me. I never wake up in the morning and go “Gee only if I can code on random computers”.

It sounds super nice but then I think about it a little more and it’s just fluff.

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

#280
post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

sadly, the job of a CISO typically isn't "make the most pragmatic decisions possible to keep our infrastructure secure and running smoothly". In many industries, it's more lke "join as many compliance programs as possible to expand the ability to capture revenue from regulated markets". The CISO didn't make the decision to enforce password rotation- the compliance programs your sales team asked for did

To your point, password rotation is considered an insecure practice because it causes people to append 1, 2, 3, etc to the same password. But I've seen so many companies that still insist on it.

Our penetration testers suggested we add password rotation, and I had to quote them the latest NIST guidelines which state "Verifiers SHOULD NOT require memorized secrets to be changed arbitrarily (e.g., periodically)."

If they don't know better, it's not surprising other companies don't either.

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