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Google Cloud Workstations – Fully managed browser-based development environments

40 points by sandGorgon 4y ago

ethanpil 4y ago
Choose your own adventure. You begin your new pie in the sky project on the shiny new Google Workstation. One day the big G in the sky: A) suddenly suspends your workstation without notice and no recourse or contact for tech support. after giving up all hope, ignore this account and then eventually go to (B) or (C) B) Cancels the entire Workstation product C) Loses interest in Workstation and leaves it to slowly die with a minimum life support and no bug fixes or updates for years and then... Go to (B)
- jiggawatts 4y ago
  Comments along these lines are invariably the top-rated feedback to every such Google announcement. There is no way that they are unaware of this customer sentiment at this point. Which makes me wonder: why haven't done anything about this?
  - metadat 4y ago
    Because the Big-G CEO Sundar Pichai and CFO Ruthless Ruth Porat are merely stewards serving at the wish of and executing orders from, erm, fulfilling the vision of the board of directors (Larry Page, Sergey Brin, etc). At this late stage, it's time to exploit the resources and milk thr asset for every last penny. The board of directors are concerned primarily about profitability and ROI. Nothing lasts forever. Except perhaps man's greedy desire to accumulate ever more wealth and power. This too, shall pass.
  - paulryanrogers 4y ago
    The executive function of a large enough organism may lose control of some of bodily functions. Or their compensation may depend upon the existing incentive structure, regardless of how customer-hostile it may become.
  - addicted 4y ago
    Because it doesn’t impact the handful of money earners they do have. ie various version of Ads.
vishal075 4y ago
Fully managed development environments will be the norm in the future. As the world already moved to cloud, now is the time for devs to focus on just building the products without worrying about configurations and installations. With the flexible, containerized dev environments that enable coding from anywhere, No matter where in the world, devs can securely build and bring out new products.
- hulitu 4y ago
  That is a manager's wet dream. The reallity is a bit different. How can i connect a licence dongle to this "Cloud Workstation" ?
  - carlosdp 4y ago
    That's something that 99% of software teams probably don't have to deal with... (I've never worked on one or heard of one that had to) I wouldn't be too worried about it if I were a company working on cloud IDEs for now.
  - jerlam 4y ago
    Probably more of an accountant's wet dream. With this, you can layoff a big chunk of the IT, endpoint security, and software licensing teams.
- mountainriver 4y ago
  Agree this will be the norm but hopefully we develop vendor agnostic APIs for it
  - debosmit 4y ago
    +1 things like terraform are great for the initial setup, but there is a lack for tooling around recurring management -- although, docker does help the story for having ephemeral environments quite a bit it would be great to see developer environments be able to consume helm charts etc to create production-like environments but the overall sprawl around the variety of cloud-hosted or other SaaS products that are used in applications nowadays makes that quite hard - imo would be really nice to have a dev-tenancy variant for things like MongoDB, Datadog, etc
SilverBirch 4y ago
Maybe Google could start some sort of endowment fund. Like "We've deposited $1Bn dollars into this ringfenced fund, if we cancel this project, this endowment will pay for engineers to continue to work and support it for the next 10 years"
therealbilly 4y ago
No cloud for me. I like having my hardware in front of me. The soothing LED's and gentle swoosh of the cooling fans puts me at ease. I'll let the young turks bust their ass on those crappy cloud platforms. I also like my best of breed software. I don't want to use cloud analogs of my favorite tools.
- psyclobe 4y ago
  Here here! ~14ms latency is noticeable and tiresome, on any remote interface.
xs83 4y ago
A control plane fee of $0.2 / hour This is excessive - takes a reasonable machine up to 55c per hour - that's ~$4 per day for an 8 hour day - $120 per month.

40 points by sandGorgon 4y ago

Choose your own adventure. You begin your new pie in the sky project on the shiny new Google Workstation. One day the big G in the sky: A) suddenly suspends your workstation without notice and no recourse or contact for tech support. after giving up all hope, ignore this account and then eventually go to (B) or (C) B) Cancels the entire Workstation product C) Loses interest in Workstation and leaves it to slowly die with a minimum life support and no bug fixes or updates for years and then... Go to (B)

jiggawatts 4y ago
Comments along these lines are invariably the top-rated feedback to every such Google announcement. There is no way that they are unaware of this customer sentiment at this point. Which makes me wonder: why haven't done anything about this?
- metadat 4y ago
  Because the Big-G CEO Sundar Pichai and CFO Ruthless Ruth Porat are merely stewards serving at the wish of and executing orders from, erm, fulfilling the vision of the board of directors (Larry Page, Sergey Brin, etc). At this late stage, it's time to exploit the resources and milk thr asset for every last penny. The board of directors are concerned primarily about profitability and ROI. Nothing lasts forever. Except perhaps man's greedy desire to accumulate ever more wealth and power. This too, shall pass.
- paulryanrogers 4y ago
  The executive function of a large enough organism may lose control of some of bodily functions. Or their compensation may depend upon the existing incentive structure, regardless of how customer-hostile it may become.
- addicted 4y ago
  Because it doesn’t impact the handful of money earners they do have. ie various version of Ads.

vishal075 4y ago

Fully managed development environments will be the norm in the future. As the world already moved to cloud, now is the time for devs to focus on just building the products without worrying about configurations and installations. With the flexible, containerized dev environments that enable coding from anywhere, No matter where in the world, devs can securely build and bring out new products.

hulitu 4y ago
That is a manager's wet dream. The reallity is a bit different. How can i connect a licence dongle to this "Cloud Workstation" ?
- carlosdp 4y ago
  That's something that 99% of software teams probably don't have to deal with... (I've never worked on one or heard of one that had to) I wouldn't be too worried about it if I were a company working on cloud IDEs for now.
- jerlam 4y ago
  Probably more of an accountant's wet dream. With this, you can layoff a big chunk of the IT, endpoint security, and software licensing teams.
mountainriver 4y ago
Agree this will be the norm but hopefully we develop vendor agnostic APIs for it
- debosmit 4y ago
  +1 things like terraform are great for the initial setup, but there is a lack for tooling around recurring management -- although, docker does help the story for having ephemeral environments quite a bit it would be great to see developer environments be able to consume helm charts etc to create production-like environments but the overall sprawl around the variety of cloud-hosted or other SaaS products that are used in applications nowadays makes that quite hard - imo would be really nice to have a dev-tenancy variant for things like MongoDB, Datadog, etc

SilverBirch 4y ago

Maybe Google could start some sort of endowment fund. Like "We've deposited $1Bn dollars into this ringfenced fund, if we cancel this project, this endowment will pay for engineers to continue to work and support it for the next 10 years"

therealbilly 4y ago

No cloud for me. I like having my hardware in front of me. The soothing LED's and gentle swoosh of the cooling fans puts me at ease. I'll let the young turks bust their ass on those crappy cloud platforms. I also like my best of breed software. I don't want to use cloud analogs of my favorite tools.

psyclobe 4y ago
Here here! ~14ms latency is noticeable and tiresome, on any remote interface.

xs83 4y ago

A control plane fee of $0.2 / hour This is excessive - takes a reasonable machine up to 55c per hour - that's ~$4 per day for an 8 hour day - $120 per month.