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Devpod: Remote development environment at Uber

uber.com

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Re: Devpod: Remote development environment at Uber

#231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see #1 happening. There is no way anyone has my personally customized development setup in some VM ready to use. More likely it is going to be one common setup that they want everyone to use.

> my personally customized development setup Why would your personally customized development setup even need to be on the remote host? You pop up your IDE, connect to the remote host via SSH and you are set.

My IDE is designed to run on the remote system and be accessed via SSH and so it needs it's configs synced over or packaged up in some way. It is a bit more work to setup, but pays dividends in many ways.

Re: Devpod: Remote development environment at Uber

#232
post #35

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> 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…

I don't see #1 happening. There is no way anyone has my personally customized development setup in some VM ready to use. More likely it is going to be one common setup that they want everyone to use.

For things like github codespaces, you can bring your own dotfiles to company codespaces. https://docs.github.com/en/codespaces/customizing-your-codes...

Re: Devpod: Remote development environment at Uber

#233
post #194

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'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.

> If your workload needs those CPUs, a better comparison would be against the “Dedicated 32 GB” plan

I'm not sure what you mean. The "Dedicated 32 GB" plan is 6x my quoted price. Why wouldn't the comparison be to the midpoint of the "Dedicated 8 GB" and "Dedicated 16 GB" plans (which have 4 and 8 CPUs respectively)? That would be around $0.14 per hour, about 2.5x my quoted price.

Anyway, it seems highly unlikely that local development, which uses CPU very burstily, needs a dedicated plan.

Re: Devpod: Remote development environment at Uber

#234
post #194

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'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 a…

> $2000-4000 will get you a really powerful M1/M2 Mac

If we take this as the basis for comparison, then the same dollars will buy 1-2 (working hours only) years of Linode 96 GB with 20 cores, so it seems like cloud services indeed lose competitiveness at the high end.

Re: Devpod: Remote development environment at Uber

#235
post #223

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> Bazel is extremely cool! But you end up with, like, a handful of people on the team who can write Bazel and eveyone else cargo culting their way through it. It's not that difficult and docs are outstanding. It can and it will be worse with your own Bash-isms that likely won't have any docs at all.

I think Bazel is doing a lot of good stuff... but I think it suffers a bit from the same thing as Angular, where it makes a lot of its own terminology. There is another aspect where if you are using a language like Python or JS then you have to kind of swim upstream to get an existing project onto Bazel. Far from impossible but if you just look at the default Bazel stuff without pulling in third-party libs it's prett…

Why would you not pull third-party libs? I presume you use loads of them in the actual codebase how is this different?
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