Sound like it could be really useful. Wondering if there will be a method to load the remote workspace locally if I need to do development without internet (travelling, etc)
Launch HN: Nimbus (YC W22) – Cloud dev environments for teams
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Re: Launch HN: Nimbus (YC W22) – Cloud dev environments for teams
#32One of the biggest problems with dev environments is maintenance just like documentation. As a dev, when I am working on my local environment, if something breaks, I usually end up finding some hack to fix it and move on with my feature/assigned task. Most devs leave it to the "new guy" who is onboarding. I also think having templates as code might be a way to alleviate that issue to certain extent.
Nish from Nimbus here.
This is on the money. The challenge though is still giving engineers flexibility/freedom. Our approach is to have templates that engineers can use but they can fork it and play around with it, make a snapshot of that fork and share it, etc. Its a fine balance though and every team has to figure out what works best for them
Re: Launch HN: Nimbus (YC W22) – Cloud dev environments for teams
#33I like this idea, but on a side note: Mainframes are back baby! > engineers can work from any [network connected] machine because the code runs and stays in the cloud. Now that we have pervasive and quick internet in most of the places people want to work, we can start offloading the work back to centralized machines. It's honestly a more efficient use of resources to have shared central systems, we just had to move…
Neil from the Nimbus here.
Yeah, we are actually huge fans of writing code on the cloud!
To me personally, It feels awesome to offload the package/repo download to the data centers, which can be way more faster than my own network. Not even mention that my laptop no longer heats up crazily - I can just put it on my lap and write code.
Re: Launch HN: Nimbus (YC W22) – Cloud dev environments for teams
#34Sound like it could be really useful. Wondering if there will be a method to load the remote workspace locally if I need to do development without internet (travelling, etc)
Great question! (Also a tough one)
I have been using Nimbus on my flights and it works well. Of course depends on your geolocation, the latency can be higher than normal but the internet speed should not be a blocker because all the intense internet traffic happens on the data center.
However, without internet it would be challenging to leverage Nimbus solution at this moment since the environments live on the cloud 100% now. But in the future, we will look into a hybrid solution. In short, we can offer the option to rsync (or similar tools) the cloud environments into your local or the other way around to facilitate this corner case.
Re: Launch HN: Nimbus (YC W22) – Cloud dev environments for teams
#35Sound like it could be really useful. Wondering if there will be a method to load the remote workspace locally if I need to do development without internet (travelling, etc)
Nish from Nimbus here
We have some loose plans but not really high up to be honest.
From a traveling perspective, it works well... as long as you have internet..you get fast download speeds (based on AWS data center transfer speeds), can work on an env more powerful than ultrabooks, and your battery life is longer.
But you can't work from a jungle or a plane without wifi :)
Re: Launch HN: Nimbus (YC W22) – Cloud dev environments for teams
#36This is awesome - congrats on the launch!!!
Re: Launch HN: Nimbus (YC W22) – Cloud dev environments for teams
#37how does it work ? it is git integrated i assume...and do u export a Dockerfile or something to replicate the exact runtime ? my fundamental question is : how easy is it to go from writing code to production deployment ? This has been the big issue with cloud dev. Take an example of Python flask with Pandas. There are problems depending on whether u used an alpine dev environment or debian. Now if i just take the cod…
Neil from Nimbus here.
You can view Nimbus workspace as a linux machine that you have, but on the cloud. We built an internal Dockerfile-like IDL to replicate the exact dev environment every time when a new workspace is being created.
- We love Dockerfile, but we didn't directly build on top of it because there are more configurations we want to enable (such as on create/start/stop/delete lifecycle hooks, and personal/team configs).
- That being said, I can imagine exporting a Dockerfile can be feasible on Nimbus for the future (sufficient to replicate a new dev environment), but with certain Nimbus specific features missing there.
> it is git integrated i assume...
And yes, you are right! It's has git integration, and we are working on more tooling integrations right now to build better developer experiences (talking about all the source code management tool the team is using, credentials/env variable tools, etc)
> how easy is it to go from writing code to production deployment?
I'm totally with you. As an engineer myself, to me, only having code deployed on the production marks the completion of something, instead of just merging the code to the main branch. So it's important to have an efficient/stable way to move a piece of code to PR, to staging, and eventually to production.
As for Nimbus team, we don't solve this question as our main value prop, but we do facilitate that for sure, by
- making Nimbus a seamless part of engineers dev workflow (among all your task tracking, SCM, CI/CD tools)
- providing flexibly on setting up the dev environment (e.g. you can set it up in a way that is more consistent with the production setup, but still contain development-specific tools)
> Can i single click create a running docker environment with my running code EXACTLY like the code dev environment.
Not an expert of Sagemaker myself - do you mean auto-generating a Dockerfile based on your codebase? :-)
Re: Launch HN: Nimbus (YC W22) – Cloud dev environments for teams
#38Re: Launch HN: Nimbus (YC W22) – Cloud dev environments for teams
#39how does it work ? it is git integrated i assume...and do u export a Dockerfile or something to replicate the exact runtime ? my fundamental question is : how easy is it to go from writing code to production deployment ? This has been the big issue with cloud dev. Take an example of Python flask with Pandas. There are problems depending on whether u used an alpine dev environment or debian. Now if i just take the cod…
> "my fundamental question is : how easy is it to go from writing code to production deployment ? This has been the big issue with cloud dev." This is my question too.
answered on the parent comment - plz let me know if it doesn't answer the question for you
Re: Launch HN: Nimbus (YC W22) – Cloud dev environments for teams
#40This is awesome - congrats on the launch!!!
thanks!!