Devpod: Remote development environment at Uber • Hacker News Board

Re: Devpod: Remote development environment at Uber

#31

Post by cyc116 » Mon, Dec 19, 2022, 1:59 AM UTC

cloudking wrote: post #3

This sounds awesome, but not practical for smaller companies. The cloud costs must be significant? "Faster Git, Build, and IDE experience by utilizing beefy cloud resources–up to 48 cores and 96 GB of RAM per environment"

Does smaller companies have mono repos that size?

Re: Devpod: Remote development environment at Uber

#32

Post by Moto7451 » Mon, Dec 19, 2022, 1:59 AM UTC

cloudking wrote: post #3

This sounds awesome, but not practical for smaller companies. The cloud costs must be significant? "Faster Git, Build, and IDE experience by utilizing beefy cloud resources–up to 48 cores and 96 GB of RAM per environment"

Correct. My last job built a low rent version of this and it was very painful. 15-45 minutes to launch a pod that would have taken 3 minutes under Compose. Pushed a new base image? Whole thing would roll over and need another 15-45 minutes.

To do this well it takes manpower. There are some off the shelf options out there for remote/prod like Kubernetes based development that are smarter choices than building your own. The table stakes for doing this is being a big corp that can afford to spend millions on one custom tool with a hope for positive ROI. For the rest of us, find something that works that is open source or easily licensed.

Re: Devpod: Remote development environment at Uber

#33

Post by judge2020 » Mon, Dec 19, 2022, 2:00 AM UTC

esprehn wrote: post #20

judge2020 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was probably just a RDP connection, which either signals how old this insight is, or how far behind Uber is on these new ways to remotely code.

The post clearly shows they're not using RDP. That said Projector round tripped all the key strokes to get new draw commands (unlike VSCode) which also results in lag. The new IntelliJ remote architecture is much better, and it seems Uber is moving that way too.

They're using this now, but I imagine the user ValleZ's comment is about a past time working at Uber or hearing stories from Uber developer friends, in which I can see why spinning up a low-latency (but still over 30+ millisecond RTT) virtual machine would be an early solution to developers trying to cut down on build times and whatnot.

Re: Devpod: Remote development environment at Uber

#34

Post by 0xB31B1B » Mon, Dec 19, 2022, 2:01 AM UTC

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…

Its a lot easier to manage dev envs if everyone is literally using cloned ec2 instances that can be remotely fixed/managed by devexp teams. These type of projects are a big step forward IMO

Re: Devpod: Remote development environment at Uber

#35

Post by allset_ » Mon, Dec 19, 2022, 2:06 AM UTC

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…

> 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 left off with zero effort.

> Not being able to run the project natively

What do you mean by this? It's just running on a remote server rather than your laptop.

Re: Devpod: Remote development environment at Uber

#36

Post by layer8 » Mon, Dec 19, 2022, 2:08 AM UTC

why5s wrote: post #30

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…

For work-related stuff: I disagree. We're not even at Uber's scale at my company and I hate having to manage the ever-changing set of dependencies that I have no control over.

The thing is, it doesn’t have to be ever-changing, and creating a reproducible working setup locally can be achieved by appropriate setup scripts.

Re: Devpod: Remote development environment at Uber

#37

Post by chazeon » Mon, Dec 19, 2022, 2:13 AM UTC

Glad to see industry adopting cloud server + ssh + code-server / code-remote as a standard. As a PhD student I have been working on HPCs like this with an environment I built myself for a while. It is really good and helps you to move fast.

Re: Devpod: Remote development environment at Uber

#38

Post by SnowHill9902 » Mon, Dec 19, 2022, 2:17 AM UTC

Dumb terminal + mainframe over IP?

Re: Devpod: Remote development environment at Uber

#39

Post by __MatrixMan__ » Mon, Dec 19, 2022, 2:19 AM UTC

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…

Also, It just passes the problem down the line. If your dependencies are too messy to manage locally as a dev then they're gonna be an ops nightmare too. Just commit to maintaining a flake.nix and use whatever computer you want.

Re: Devpod: Remote development environment at Uber

#40

Post by berkle4455 » Mon, Dec 19, 2022, 2:22 AM UTC

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.