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Even VMs can be run on these laptops. It takes effort to create them right. My clients routinely use machines with 4GB of RAM and need VMs to do development (We

Even VMs can be run on these laptops. It takes effort to create them right. My clients routinely use machines with 4GB of RAM and need VMs to do development (We're in India). So we've made our VMs smaller and easier to install. The nice thing about that is when I demo to folks in Europe/US/Japan. Our stuff simply files on their hulking huge 16GB machines. Of course it's not free ride, one has to carefully eliminate packages on the guest VM that are not strictly necessary and carefully reduce the size of the image. Also they need to to avoid doing really large data computation on their VMs.

thinkmassive 10y ago
So your clients trade the cost of 4GB RAM (maybe a day or two worth of developer time) for having developers constantly tweak Linux images to run on a laptop with 4GB RAM? This is beyond simply removing packages, because you're talking about memory, not just disk space.
- fooker 10y ago
  Eh, it shouldn't take much effort. Put Arch (or something similar), use openbox or LXDE for a reasonably useful GUI and you have an image that takes ..maybe.. 100 megs when idle. You do not have to do this from scratch each time, just clone the disk, or even better have a script that generates these images modulo some parameters.
  - thinkmassive 10y ago
    Server VMs shouldn't require a window manager. They also shouldn't be idle during testing though, and I would think 512 MB is a reasonable minimum for doing anything useful. Double that for a database. My point is that you can get a laptop with 8GB RAM instead of 4GB and should pay for itself within a couple days.
  - thinkmassive 10y ago
    ...and yes, I'm aware this doesn't need to be done from scratch every time :) It's still a waste of time if you need to reduce a standard minimal Linux install whatsoever (ISO via Packer, Vagrant, Docker, whatever the case may be)
- sumanthvepa 10y ago
  Actually, we (or more accurately our software automation) tweaks the images. You're right about RAM. Part of what we do when we 'tweak' is move memory intensive processes to either the cloud or a datacenter. Our client's developers just install and use the VMs as they normally would. No tweaking on their part needed. So our clients are trading the time of their developers and cost of upgrading entire teams to fancy machines, to paying us to deal with the pain of tweaking images and dealing with the devops. Most of their developers are doing web development. But a lot of them want to replicate the entire stack for themselves on their local machines. So we enable some of that by simply having the automation create dedicated dbs etc for them on shared/cloud infra and create just we webdev environment in their local VM. For ourselves, Wwe use automation (and build it) and some nice hardware to do the development (Definitely not laptops for devops automation). But then we're only 3 people. So even though each of us has several workstations, servers and laptops at our disposal, our clients don't need such expense for each of their developers. Works out well for both parties. :-)
- Spooky23 10y ago
  Our engineering guys maintain images that are stripped and hardened for the dev team. That way we don't waste time optimizing at deployment time or deploy crap into production. Our java people need more memory and we addressed it by giving them server VMs and CI tools.

thinkmassive 10y ago

So your clients trade the cost of 4GB RAM (maybe a day or two worth of developer time) for having developers constantly tweak Linux images to run on a laptop with 4GB RAM? This is beyond simply removing packages, because you're talking about memory, not just disk space.

fooker 10y ago
Eh, it shouldn't take much effort. Put Arch (or something similar), use openbox or LXDE for a reasonably useful GUI and you have an image that takes ..maybe.. 100 megs when idle. You do not have to do this from scratch each time, just clone the disk, or even better have a script that generates these images modulo some parameters.
- thinkmassive 10y ago
  Server VMs shouldn't require a window manager. They also shouldn't be idle during testing though, and I would think 512 MB is a reasonable minimum for doing anything useful. Double that for a database. My point is that you can get a laptop with 8GB RAM instead of 4GB and should pay for itself within a couple days.
- thinkmassive 10y ago
  ...and yes, I'm aware this doesn't need to be done from scratch every time :) It's still a waste of time if you need to reduce a standard minimal Linux install whatsoever (ISO via Packer, Vagrant, Docker, whatever the case may be)
sumanthvepa 10y ago
Actually, we (or more accurately our software automation) tweaks the images. You're right about RAM. Part of what we do when we 'tweak' is move memory intensive processes to either the cloud or a datacenter. Our client's developers just install and use the VMs as they normally would. No tweaking on their part needed. So our clients are trading the time of their developers and cost of upgrading entire teams to fancy machines, to paying us to deal with the pain of tweaking images and dealing with the devops. Most of their developers are doing web development. But a lot of them want to replicate the entire stack for themselves on their local machines. So we enable some of that by simply having the automation create dedicated dbs etc for them on shared/cloud infra and create just we webdev environment in their local VM. For ourselves, Wwe use automation (and build it) and some nice hardware to do the development (Definitely not laptops for devops automation). But then we're only 3 people. So even though each of us has several workstations, servers and laptops at our disposal, our clients don't need such expense for each of their developers. Works out well for both parties. :-)
Spooky23 10y ago
Our engineering guys maintain images that are stripped and hardened for the dev team. That way we don't waste time optimizing at deployment time or deploy crap into production. Our java people need more memory and we addressed it by giving them server VMs and CI tools.