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Devpod: Remote development environment at Uber

uber.com

11–20 of 235 posts

Re: Devpod: Remote development environment at Uber

#11
post #7

Most developers in Uber use local builds anyway because of input lag. Dev pods were mostly good to prevent laptop from working at 100% fan volume at all times though.

Why is there input lag?

I’ve used something identical and mosh makes this just work. Most devs at that company swear by remote builds and hate laptop builds

Re: Devpod: Remote development environment at Uber

#15
This sounds great. Certainly the IP zealots love it because the code never leaves the walled garden, and it’s a super-secure blah blah environment. Consistent tooling, easy onboarding… you get the idea.

All good until you have an outage. Then your development team’s productivity drops to exactly zero while you fix it and your entire production environment is now potentially vulnerable to defects you can’t fix until the development environment is fixed (better hope it stays running). This is when companies realize that the development environment is actually a service and it needs higher SLA targets than production, but it will never get the attention that it needs to achieve those targets (because it’s just dev, right?).

Re: Devpod: Remote development environment at Uber

#16

We already have something like this at Meta for improving developer experience. All our dev environments are remote

Any externally visible docs on it? Google's is documented at https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/developers-practitioner...

Re: Devpod: Remote development environment at Uber

#17
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would it need to be per user? An environment of that size could easily support many users. Developers spend most of their time just staring and only intermittently need to build. There is no particular reason why everyone would be building at once. Most of the time you'll get all those cores to yourself even though there could be dozens of devs sharing the box.

We’re coming around full circle to the old days of thin client terminals to a beefy mainframe under the corporation’s control. Only it’s hosted in the cloud and all your data is at risk.

You can run it not in cloud. Uber uses its own DCs (although not sure they do that for dev). It’ll probably be more expensive because you can’t scale everything down for the night (unless you have dev teams spread globally).

Re: Devpod: Remote development environment at Uber

#18
post #7

Most developers in Uber use local builds anyway because of input lag. Dev pods were mostly good to prevent laptop from working at 100% fan volume at all times though.

Why is there input lag? I’ve used something identical and mosh makes this just work. Most devs at that company swear by remote builds and hate laptop builds

Mosh doesn't work with SSH bastions (kind of obviously, but admittedly a bummer indeed), which Uber's blog post shows they use (as do many other similarly-sized companies).

Re: Devpod: Remote development environment at Uber

#19
post #7

Most developers in Uber use local builds anyway because of input lag. Dev pods were mostly good to prevent laptop from working at 100% fan volume at all times though.

input lag like when typing? I use remote env on vscode and afaik it’s locally editing and syncing after the fact for lint, compilation etc

It was probably just a RDP connection, which either signals how old this insight is, or how far behind Uber is on these new ways to remotely code.

Re: Devpod: Remote development environment at Uber

#20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

input lag like when typing? I use remote env on vscode and afaik it’s locally editing and syncing after the fact for lint, compilation etc

It was probably just a RDP connection, which either signals how old this insight is, or how far behind Uber is on these new ways to remotely code.

The post clearly shows they're not using RDP.

That said Projector round tripped all the key strokes to get new draw commands (unlike VSCode) which also results in lag. The new IntelliJ remote architecture is much better, and it seems Uber is moving that way too.

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