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MoonHome: Remote Development Environment

moonhome.io

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Re: MoonHome: Remote Development Environment

#6

Post by easton »

What's the value-add here over a traditional VPS? Codespaces (or Coder/code-server, or gitpod) have the benefit of launching in your browser and being really easy to destroy/spin up if needed. This seems like you're paying for a box and you'll get SSH credentials to connect to it.

Ease of use counts for something, of course, but the market for this is developers that probably either know how to use DigitalOcean or don't know what SSH is and will stick with Codespaces or its alternatives. Static IPs are also interesting, but given the use case for me is being able to nuke my dev environment just like I nuke a git branch, as long as it's accessible somewhere I don't know how much that matters.

(I'm not trying to be down on this at all, I don't know where I'd start with launching a VPS provider. But I think there's something missing from this landing page.)

Re: MoonHome: Remote Development Environment

#7

Post by smackeyacky »

I have a lot of questions about this. What kind of machine can I provision? Can I make a remote mac for XCode shenanigans? What if I have some awful Windows thing I need to rebuild but don't want to install Visual Studio locally any more, is this a decent substitute for running up a local VM?

What kind of security is sitting around my source code? How would I guarantee when I stopped using the service that a copy wasn't kept somewhere?

Is it backed up / a snapshot done regularly? What kind of control do I have over those snapshots, the timing of them and deleting them if I decide to stop using the service?

Re: MoonHome: Remote Development Environment

#8

Post by xnyan »

If the developer is here, I like the website! One question that stands out to me, after visiting your site I don't really see how this is significantly different from a VPS. The features (CPU, ram, bandwidth, public IP address, semi-managed OS, storage) seem to be more or less on par with what I would pay with AWS Lightsail, Linode VPS or a dozen other providers.

Re: MoonHome: Remote Development Environment

#9

Post by jagger27 »

The pricing seems reasonable and more or less inline with what an equivalent VPS would cost. I have a couple questions:

> When not used, Moonhome is disconnected from the network for maximum protection. When running, it sits safely behind the built-in network firewall.

So does this mean when I ssh in it proxies and forwards the connection to the actual host which is otherwise unexposed to the public internet? Seems like a reasonable thing to do, I guess.

> We update system images every night, so you don’t have to worry about any of that.

Okay, this seems fine at first glance but it’s really unclear. If I have Go installed, for example, will that be updated automatically or are my own development tools fully under my control and up to me to update? Also, what is the underlying distribution behind all of this? Is it just running ‘apt upgrade’ on a cron job or are you doing something else?

Is it a giant stack of Docker containers with some persistent storage?

Is this open source? Can I run a single command on a North American Digital Ocean droplet and run this closer to home? I don’t see much point in putting my dev env on the other side of an ocean.

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