Virtualizing development environments in 2023
1–10 of 76 posts
Re: Virtualizing development environments in 2023
#2> Many cloud providers, like AWS inside VM-based EC2 instances, won't let you run a VM since they don't support nested virtualization
Does anyone know if there's a technical limitation to nested virt on EC2 or if it's just so people use .metal? I know Azure recently (1-2 years?) started offering it.
Re: Virtualizing development environments in 2023
#3> Many cloud providers, like AWS inside VM-based EC2 instances, won't let you run a VM since they don't support nested virtualization Does anyone know if there's a technical limitation to nested virt on EC2 or if it's just so people use .metal? I know Azure recently (1-2 years?) started offering it.
Nested virt doesn't work with some things like OS snapshot/restore, so they might not support it to allow those features.
Re: Virtualizing development environments in 2023
#4Author doesn’t mention it but I wonder if tried or considered Nix/NixOS’s reproducible developer environments and ruled them out for any reason. I couldn’t tell from the article if there’s something unique to his requirements that disqualifies them.
Re: Virtualizing development environments in 2023
#5Author doesn’t mention it but I wonder if tried or considered Nix/NixOS’s reproducible developer environments and ruled them out for any reason. I couldn’t tell from the article if there’s something unique to his requirements that disqualifies them. https://nixos.org/explore https://nix.dev/
Nix solves a different problem than Hocus. Nix lets you define a development environment, Hocus gives you a way to run it on a remote server. Right now we use Dockerfiles to let users define the packages they need in their dev env, but we would like to support Nix in the future too. Interestingly, you can use custom BuildKit syntax https://docs.docker.com/build/dockerfile/frontend/ to build Nix environments with Docker https://github.com/reproducible-containers/buildkit-nix, and that's probably what we will end up supporting.
Re: Virtualizing development environments in 2023
#6I am curious how important 100GB dev environment support and efficiently binpacking dev environments and rat-holing on memory efficiency actually matters for the first X enterprise customers for Hocus.
Memory and CPU cores are cheap. Getting the UX, resource allocation/sizing/instance type, and general pattern for multi-tenant dev boxes seems more fruitful.
Would love to see any data supporting this prioritization, and what the answer is for Workstation / HEDT-type environments given the industry's current focus on AI.
Re: Virtualizing development environments in 2023
#7> Many cloud providers, like AWS inside VM-based EC2 instances, won't let you run a VM since they don't support nested virtualization Does anyone know if there's a technical limitation to nested virt on EC2 or if it's just so people use .metal? I know Azure recently (1-2 years?) started offering it.
I can't imagine amazon prefers the use of metal vs. non-metal. As I understand the pricing they're equivalent.
Re: Virtualizing development environments in 2023
#8This blog doesn't convince me why I should care about Hocus over solutions like VSCode devcontainer + Vagrant. That is more what it is competing with, not raw Docker/VM.
Re: Virtualizing development environments in 2023
#9This blog doesn't convince me why I should care about Hocus over solutions like VSCode devcontainer + Vagrant. That is more what it is competing with, not raw Docker/VM.
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Re: Virtualizing development environments in 2023
#10Author doesn’t mention it but I wonder if tried or considered Nix/NixOS’s reproducible developer environments and ruled them out for any reason. I couldn’t tell from the article if there’s something unique to his requirements that disqualifies them. https://nixos.org/explore https://nix.dev/
Nix solves a different problem than Hocus. Nix lets you define a development environment, Hocus gives you a way to run it on a remote server. Right now we use Dockerfiles to let users define the packages they need in their dev env, but we would like to support Nix in the future too. Interestingly, you can use custom BuildKit syntax https://docs.docker.com/build/dockerfile/frontend/ to build Nix environments with Dock…
From what I can tell, devenv [1] and devbox [2] (both built on Nix) can also deploy to remote servers.