Launch HN: Nimbus (YC W22) – Cloud dev environments for teams

Neil from Nimbus here.

Thanks for the support! I'm also switching between mac (laptop) and windows (desktop) multiple times throughout the day (depends on where I'm sitting at that moment). Using Nimbus to build Nimbus definitely helped me a lot in this scenario!

> It means you have the full control and flexibility to define how your environment looks like instead of being forced to have one repo per environment. This flexibility enables the exact same experience as the one you have in your laptop from development and env management perspective.

One thing I love about Gitpod is that everyone gets the same exact environment when they start Gitpod from a repo/PR. It seems like letting every developer customize their cloud machine like they customize their local machine would lead to many of the "but it works on my machine" problems?

Not to pull attention away from the OP but do these web-based dev environments have any traction in larger organizations? To me this seemed like a novel way to enforce strictness in SDLC for junior devs writing javascript-like code but never came close to having the real IDE on your machine.

The only area where I can see this making sense is in the realm of AI/ML where you need beefy GPU's and resources to train models and it's easier to keep them close to the runners.

What's the value prop for something like this (or code spaces, or )?

If you need reproducible builds? Why not just use docker?

Liusha from Nimbus here.

Actually the larger the organizations the more necessary a cloud-based dev environment solution. That is why all the tech giants have a solution internally like Nimbus and all organizations with more than 500 engineers that I have talked to have something like Nimbus.

> To me this seemed like a novel way to enforce strictness in SDLC for junior devs writing javascript-like code...

The key is not to enforce a strict SDLC. The key word is `Consistent`. I can see some exceptions where teams want to have inconsistent environments but I believe vast majority of the teams want to have consistent environment within their eng org. It means easier onboarding, fast recovery, and better collaboration.

> ... but never came close to having the real IDE on your machine.

If you are doing iOS development or something similar I would agree that IDE on your machine is a necessary. After all, you still need XCode. (even that, I see technologies are catching up...) But other than those native apps, I don't see real difference between a local vs cloud dev environment.

Can you share some examples? What can you do on local but very difficult/impossible to do on cloud dev env?

> If you need reproducible builds? Why not just use docker?

Here are some of my thoughts:

  1. in a small scale (3 micro-services + 1 DB + 1 webapp), I think docker does an amazing job to ensure reproducible builds. But as the complexity grow, docker starts to shift from part of the solution to part of the problem. Just to throw out some questions: how to manage compatibility if a team uses Windows, Mac, Linux at the same time, even with different versions? How to ensure 237 of my engineers do not have a broken environment when I want to bump the docker version? 

  2. There are things should not be part of docker images and those things are more troublesome than the build itself sometimes. For example: credentials, env vars, and so on. I don't remember how many times I need to ask a bunch of people just to get the credentials right. 

  3. Even an amazing tool like Docker does not have 100% of the market. So we may be a good alternative for the teams who choose not to use Docker.

Of course, there are various solutions to those different problems. I believe we are one of them. Moreover, I believe we can integrate with other solutions to solve the bigger problems.

Facebook definitely does it. Thats where we first learned about this way of working. Some bigger tech companies have actually written about it (see links below) but a list of ones that we've seen with this kind of infra include LinkedIn, Shopify, Dropbox, Stripe, Slack, DataDog, and Palantir - to name a few.

Eng blog links:

LinkedIn: https://engineering.linkedin.com/blog/2021/building-in-the-c...

Shopify: https://shopify.engineering/modelling-developer-infrastructu...

Slack: https://slack.engineering/development-environments-at-slack/

Doximity: https://technology.doximity.com/articles/github-codespaces-i...