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Devpod: Remote development environment at Uber

uber.com

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Re: Devpod: Remote development environment at Uber

#41

Post by aaomidi »

berkle4455 wrote: post #40
EastSmith wrote: post #24

We are moving to such cloud environment, and it makes me sick. Maybe you need to dockerise Mongo, MySql and 5 other dependencies - I can get this, but I don't get it why the rest the code should still be running in the cloud. Python, Rails, Node? Why? Developers should be able to run 1 shell commands to install node. Dev experience excuses are just excuses for a bad setup. So, fix your setup, please. Not being able t…

I'm 100% the opposite side of this argument. Running your entire stack locally is a silly trend that cost us a decade of productivity. In the early to late 2000's the remote-dev approach was very common. It wasn't "push a button and you have a dev instance!" easy but it yielded similar results.

I'm slowly getting to the point of "I want my computers to be a thin client around some config files". Treat your computer like cattle, rather than a pet, etc etc.

Re: Devpod: Remote development environment at Uber

#42

Post by malux85 »

EastSmith wrote: post #24

We are moving to such cloud environment, and it makes me sick. Maybe you need to dockerise Mongo, MySql and 5 other dependencies - I can get this, but I don't get it why the rest the code should still be running in the cloud. Python, Rails, Node? Why? Developers should be able to run 1 shell commands to install node. Dev experience excuses are just excuses for a bad setup. So, fix your setup, please. Not being able t…

For me it’s about the hardware, I do molecular simulations and I have a machine with 96 cores and 512GB of RAM and 4 GPUs in it - I wouldn’t want this noisy machine in my house so using VSCode with remote server allows for everything I need to do - interactive debugging just like it’s local, automatic ssh means the terminal feels like it’s local, only a slight (few hundred millisecond) delay on saving,

It really feels like it’s local, I enjoy it

Re: Devpod: Remote development environment at Uber

#43

Post by whatever1 »

Even for my home lab I use a remote setup. My local workstation/server runs ubuntu with all the bells and whistles (nginx, docker, cuda etc). My dev laptop just has vs code and connects to my local server via wifi 6 &/or gigabit ethernet.

I do not notice that i develop remotely. VS code also has some great quality of life features, for example if you run a command that exposes a port in your remote machine, it automatically forwards it to your local. Same for jupyter notebooks.

VSCode finally enabled the features that command line folks enjoyed for decades.

Re: Devpod: Remote development environment at Uber

#44

Post by jimmaswell »

gandalfgeek wrote: post #22

Back in the early 2000s, Sun ("the network is the computer") had a similar solution that worked seamlessly for most of their software org-- the Sun Ray. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Ray It was a network terminal. Your files and entire session were on the server. Your “local” terminal consisted only of a network interface and enough compute power to display your session. The way they had it set up was that you co…

What's old is new again. How soon until we realize the X window system actually had some good ideas again and start running desktop apps on cloud servers for remote work?

Re: Devpod: Remote development environment at Uber

#45

Post by calvinmorrison »

allset_ wrote: post #35
EastSmith wrote: post #24

We are moving to such cloud environment, and it makes me sick. Maybe you need to dockerise Mongo, MySql and 5 other dependencies - I can get this, but I don't get it why the rest the code should still be running in the cloud. Python, Rails, Node? Why? Developers should be able to run 1 shell commands to install node. Dev experience excuses are just excuses for a bad setup. So, fix your setup, please. Not being able t…

> Why? Three reasons from my perspective: 1) There's no setup steps. You just open your editor of choice and everything is set up for you. All the build tools, linters, specific versions of software $XYZ, etc. 2) Large VM (16 core, 96GB of RAM in my case) speeds builds and tests up dramatically. 3) Zero productivity lost if your laptop breaks. Just grab a new one from IT and you're up and running exactly where you le…

Yeah as ops gets more complex i don't want to tell developers they need to install xyz with a hundred specific versions. Just grab the latest app image

Re: Devpod: Remote development environment at Uber

#47

Post by erik_seaberg »

jimmaswell wrote: post #44
gandalfgeek wrote: post #22

Back in the early 2000s, Sun ("the network is the computer") had a similar solution that worked seamlessly for most of their software org-- the Sun Ray. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Ray It was a network terminal. Your files and entire session were on the server. Your “local” terminal consisted only of a network interface and enough compute power to display your session. The way they had it set up was that you co…

What's old is new again. How soon until we realize the X window system actually had some good ideas again and start running desktop apps on cloud servers for remote work?

X maintainers are promoting a new platform that doesn’t provide for remote hardware rendering. Ironically, shipping Javascript to a web browser (local to the display) seems to be the way ahead for performance.

Re: Devpod: Remote development environment at Uber

#48

Post by paxys »

jimmaswell wrote: post #44
gandalfgeek wrote: post #22

Back in the early 2000s, Sun ("the network is the computer") had a similar solution that worked seamlessly for most of their software org-- the Sun Ray. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Ray It was a network terminal. Your files and entire session were on the server. Your “local” terminal consisted only of a network interface and enough compute power to display your session. The way they had it set up was that you co…

What's old is new again. How soon until we realize the X window system actually had some good ideas again and start running desktop apps on cloud servers for remote work?

It had some good ideas, but that was the extent of it. Every iteration of the solution since then has agreed that streaming all application UI is always going to be janky and needless. It's a lot better to host the data on the server side and let the client handle visual rendering by itself.

Re: Devpod: Remote development environment at Uber

#50

Post by paxys »

layer8 wrote: post #36
why5s wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For work-related stuff: I disagree. We're not even at Uber's scale at my company and I hate having to manage the ever-changing set of dependencies that I have no control over.

The thing is, it doesn’t have to be ever-changing, and creating a reproducible working setup locally can be achieved by appropriate setup scripts.

Easy in theory, but always breaks down for a non-trivial project with >5 developers on it.
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