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Devpod: Remote development environment at Uber

uber.com

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Re: Devpod: Remote development environment at Uber

#201

Post by deng »

dmix wrote: post #196
deng wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked on a Sun Ray. I and many colleagues absolutely hated it. These tiny machines were just way too slow to handle even the tiny amount of work they had to do. Also, everyone knows that X over network is just not made for modern applications ("modern" in the year 2000!). I worked with Matlab, and had a lot of fun trying to rotate 3D plots with a few thousand points. It was just unbearable. Then of course the "sin…

How long did the networked machines experiment last at Sun before you switched to Linux PCs? I remember that famous Larry Ellison speech in the mid 90s about how thin client/networked applications will be the future. It’s apparently what helped make him famous because no one cared about enterprise DBs in the tech media: https://tedium.co/2018/04/12/larry-ellison-network-computer-...

No, I did not work at Sun, I did my work on a Sun Ray computer at university. Sorry if that wasn't clear.

Re: Devpod: Remote development environment at Uber

#203

Post by raverbashing »

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.

Unless your dev environment literally took one decade to set-up, then it didn't take "a decade of productivity" ;)

For people who knew how to run vms or even chroots, this was not a big issue

Re: Devpod: Remote development environment at Uber

#204

Post by rollcat »

tome wrote: post #194
rtpg wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I can't really get beyond this thing about how powerful our machines on our desk are compared to what hosting providers charge if you have 12 months utilization (I get people in SV change jobs every 6 months but). I guess the thing that makes this make sense for Uber is the ginormous repo? This probably is a good "big ball of mud" solution to a bazillion tiny projects, each with varying degrees of documentation…

> Yeah I can't really get beyond this thing about how powerful our machines on our desk are compared to what hosting providers charge if you have 12 months utilization I'm not so sure. Here's a quick comparison: Desktop: Dell XPS 12ᵗʰ Gen Intel® Core™ i5-12400 Windows 11 Home Intel® UHD Graphics 730 8 GB, DDR5 256 GB SSD $669.99 https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/desktop-computers/xps-deskto... Cloud: Linode 8 GB 8 GB 4…

First off these specs are... poor. My 2012 spare laptop that I keep for nostalgia has more memory and storage.

You can't physically connect a local screen and a keyboard to a remote Linode instance, so the $0.06/h is on top of the $669.99 (which in your example doesn't include screen, input, etc).

So in that exact setup you end up with a sub-par local computer that connects to a sub-par remote computer (and creates all kinds of headaches associated with remotely accessing compute resources); where the remote computer can't do a single thing that a ($669.99+$150) $820 local computer wouldn't do much better.

All to save you how much cash? How many hours' worth of $ in engineer salary? $2000-4000 will get you a really powerful M1/M2 Mac, and if you need more than 128GB of ram then you can indeed spin up an instance - and instances with >128GB of memory are nowhere near close to $0.06/h.

Optimize for developer productivity, that is your bottleneck. Uber's problem is less of "our local machines are bad and/or expensive", more of "our setup is so convoluted, and we have so many devs, that we need to apply economies of scale to tackle the problem".

Re: Devpod: Remote development environment at Uber

#205

Post by 10000truths »

tome wrote: post #194
rtpg wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I can't really get beyond this thing about how powerful our machines on our desk are compared to what hosting providers charge if you have 12 months utilization (I get people in SV change jobs every 6 months but). I guess the thing that makes this make sense for Uber is the ginormous repo? This probably is a good "big ball of mud" solution to a bazillion tiny projects, each with varying degrees of documentation…

> Yeah I can't really get beyond this thing about how powerful our machines on our desk are compared to what hosting providers charge if you have 12 months utilization I'm not so sure. Here's a quick comparison: Desktop: Dell XPS 12ᵗʰ Gen Intel® Core™ i5-12400 Windows 11 Home Intel® UHD Graphics 730 8 GB, DDR5 256 GB SSD $669.99 https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/desktop-computers/xps-deskto... Cloud: Linode 8 GB 8 GB 4…

Not a great comparison. The i5-12400 has 6 physical P-cores. The Linode instance you mention has 4 vCPUs, which typically correspond to logical cores and are subject to noisy neighbors. If your workload needs those CPUs, a better comparison would be against the “Dedicated 32 GB” plan, which has 16 dedicated vCPUs. Those instances are 3x your quoted price.

Re: Devpod: Remote development environment at Uber

#206

Post by stryan »

mhitza wrote: post #77
jimmaswell wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I bet on LAN X11 forwarding was pretty sweet, but when I tried it over Wi-Fi/tethering is was pretty janky (and before someone suggests xpra, that wasn't buttery smooth either). But I do like the idea of what X11 forwarding is, better than VNC where whole desktop is shared. I read that on Windows RDP can "stream" only the window, whereas on Linux the implementation is full desktop only? (please correct me if I'm wron…

IIRC, part of the problem is X11 forwarding works best when the software is using raw X primitives (someone can correct my terminology if I'm wrong) because then X11 can just send draw commands. Both GTK and Qt don't use the X11 primitives so instead the server has to send entire pixel buffers, which is naturally a lot slower.

Re: Devpod: Remote development environment at Uber

#207

Post by microsoftdoes »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #133
paxys wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure but most regular consumer or business applications don't really need that level of graphical power. Rendering a menu or button or blurb of text locally from some layout language is always going to be more performant than streaming raw pixels from a server.

It would be, if everyone agreed on a toolkit. As it as, at least X11, AFAIK Wayland, and Windows/RDP ended up just throwing pixels over the wire because every program renders text/menus/whatever differently.

RDP does not mostly do that. It sends higher level commands like text and geometry placement. That’s why it performs 10x better than the competition.

Re: Devpod: Remote development environment at Uber

#208

Post by debosmit »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #143
lhorie wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the reasons we developed devpods was because our setup scripts were unmanageable. Instructions to new employees would say things like "run this thing, scroll up past dozens of pages of stdout noise and manually deal w/ the errors buried therein by looking up relevant FAQs in some doc somewhere" The scripts would touch every technology imaginable, from brew to npm to arc (phabricator's cli) to proprietary tools…

> run this thing, scroll up past dozens of pages of stdout noise and manually deal w/ the errors buried therein by looking up relevant FAQs in some doc somewhere Okay, but if you can define/script your environment enough to run in a pod, couldn't you just run that locally? You already have to solve the manual steps either way...

Re: if a computer can run scripts in a pod, can’t you just run them locally?

It’s a construct of the order of operations.

One core issue with local is the variety of OS’ and local build tools that would fundamentally mess with the centralized scripts. Getting company-wide setup scripts to work on top of existing laptop config was a continuous challenge. Hence, having a consistent baseline (OS flavor, system-level packages) on top of which the company-wide “setup script” is added followed by “developer-customizations” seems to work great.

Central teams can manage the first couple of steps and individual user-specific configuration can be managed much better in a decentralized manner.

Re: Devpod: Remote development environment at Uber

#209

Post by debosmit »

Dave3of5 wrote: post #176
ghuntley wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having to develop with circa 360ms pings was a contributing factor to me deciding to leave Gitpod. https://ghuntley.com/tea

Wow that's insane glad I decided not to use gitpod.

fwiw, we’re solving this at DevZero with having multiple AZs - given that our platform centrally manages remote compute (hibernation etc), this is working great at making sure latencies are <20ms for users

Re: Devpod: Remote development environment at Uber

#210

Post by debosmit »

decodebytes wrote: post #138

This just seems like a lot of cloud costs to take on, considering how much power developers laptops carry and would be completely untapped. Instead of having everything remote, to me it appears more sensible to have a distributed development environment. I guess this would look something like the dagger.io folks are shooting for.

we’re not seeing cloud costs be too terrible at DevZero - with proper hibernation/suspension, cloud costs are ~$50-60/mo in the worst case admittedly, we target only enterprise companies where the cost of loss of dev efficiencies is much higher

Say net cost to company for an engineer is $100k-$200k+. Even a net 10% savings over a year means $10k-$20k+ vs a $600-1k/yr investment (in worst case). Security posture is also significantly improved, which admittedly is harder to assign a $ value to

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