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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

#381

Post by isignal »

dugmartin wrote: post #187
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.

If you do your work in VSCode you can setup the following pretty easily and it works really well (I use it to connect to my workstation in my home office when I work in a coffee shop on my laptop or the rare occasions I go into the office): 1. Install Tailscale ( https://tailscale.com/ ) on your laptop and workstation and enable the "MagicDNS" ( https://tailscale.com/kb/1081/magicdns/ ) feature. This sets up a VPN me…

If your work already uses tailscale, you can use enclave to achieve the same thing. Enclave and tailscale seem to coexist fine.

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

#382

Post by mattnewton »

cbHXBY1D wrote: post #373
aleksiy123 wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, to be clear for Google work I am talking about the combination of Cloudtop (VM), Cider (IDE), Blaze/Bazel (Builds). In addition you also need a version control / file sync system. It's also nice to have some kind of network proxy especially if you are doing web dev. Tools or web services run on the VM and you just access it directly through the proxy on your local browser. The integration/combination of these i…

You also should mention the use of CitC. With CitC, I can build/write code from my work machine at the office and then go home and gmosh into a cloudtop that uses the same network mounted filesystem.

I thought network filesystems were a terrible idea until I used citc + piper, really two incredible pieces of engineering infra. So many problems are reduced to just writing files to disk if you have a magically disk that acts like it is infinitely sized and everywhere all at once with low latency and versioned by the second. Whatever promotions they offered those authors and maintainers, and whatever black magic they had to invoke, it really was worth it.

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

#383

Post by aleksiy123 »

cbHXBY1D wrote: post #373
aleksiy123 wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, to be clear for Google work I am talking about the combination of Cloudtop (VM), Cider (IDE), Blaze/Bazel (Builds). In addition you also need a version control / file sync system. It's also nice to have some kind of network proxy especially if you are doing web dev. Tools or web services run on the VM and you just access it directly through the proxy on your local browser. The integration/combination of these i…

You also should mention the use of CitC. With CitC, I can build/write code from my work machine at the office and then go home and gmosh into a cloudtop that uses the same network mounted filesystem.

Yep, I sorta glossed over it with file sync. But I guess CitC is more than that. Its more like a workspace sync.

It acts like a view of the monorepo and holds whatever changes you make. Additionally it integrates with your version control and holds its state as well. For example any local commits or branches.

And this can all be accessed from the browser or the CLI on any connected machine.

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

#384

Post by lovehashbrowns »

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.

I didn’t deal with citrix but I did have to frequently SSH into cruise ships at a job some years ago. Goodness was the latency frustrating beyond belief. I didn’t last more than 6 months at that job.

Every single command input/key stroke could take 2-5+ seconds to display on my screen. Imagine trying to troubleshoot something critical in that type of environment. Luckily, I didn’t encounter anything truly critical, it was mostly maintenance tasks and such.

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

#385

Post by vineyardmike »

gw99 wrote: post #11

Yep. Having worked in these environments, this solution is almost always sold to companies that are working around shitty hard to reproduce software stacks, staff trust issues, scale up difficulties and checkbox security cargo cults. The resulting outcome is usually increased staff turnover, increased cost and decreased productivity. Most of this they are having trouble rationalising or acknowledging still. You don't…

> issues, scale up difficulties and checkbox security cargo cults.

> You don't want to work for those companies

I can’t defend the likes of Citrix but I’ve been the guy who has to tell an intern on their last day to hand over the flash drive with code we know they copied over the day before. Sometimes avoiding those issues is easier.

Also weird tech stacks are a real issue (but there are lots of developer-native tools for the job).

> It's notably different if you have a cloud VM running linux and you're connecting to it with VScode or something over SSH. That's borderline acceptable. The reality is usually some horrible AWS, Azure or Citrix portalised solution however.

100% agree. VSCode and VM is my only accepted solution now.

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

#386

Post by jdelman »

paxys wrote: post #302
jdelman wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of curiosity, how much are you paying a month using Cloud Console that way?

Why would they be paying for it out of pocket?

They said they were using it for side projects. Even if Google is subsidizing the bill, I'm interested to know how much something like this would cost.

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

#387

Post by jiggawatts »

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!

2017

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

#388

Post by nsm »

MarkSweep wrote: post #250
qw wrote: 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.

Is there a way in JB Gateway to re-use an existing project?

I am in the office 50% of the time, working on my desktop with CLion. The other 50% I'm remote. The one time I tried Gateway, it asked me to create a new project, which meant building another index of a giant codebase, and not having any of my per-project settings. The time and disk space of another index turned me off right away. I couldn't find a way to just re-use the existing project. So for now I just suffer through using NoMachine to remote in, and then operate CLion.

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

#390

Post by flerchin »

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…

It's not that it can't be done well, it's that it's not likely to be done well, especially at a large org.
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