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> persistent wasted RAM/disk space, awful disk IO performance I'm getting cranky about arguments against VMs. 1) I have had more RAM than I ever use for about

> persistent wasted RAM/disk space, awful disk IO performance I'm getting cranky about arguments against VMs. 1) I have had more RAM than I ever use for about 25 years. I upgrade about every 4 to 6 years. Is everyone else writing code on Amigas? 2) I keep getting told by everyone (IT, devops, DBA, my boss, his boss) that disk space is cheap. 3) VirtualBox has been consistently ok for about 10 years and I almost always can outrun scripts in a Linux VM on my Windows machine compared to our production AWS instance running K8s. Of course my machine would never keep up with a high user count but this is about disk performance, and locally I can prove both my monolith and my VM are faster. I don't see how arguments like these are good anymore with the modern hardware of a local dev system. That makes containers an over complication. The only reason to do them is to save devops the headache of having to create a docker file. I mean the guys read books and watch YouTube while I'm writing code, so...they can write the damn docker file.

lstodd 4y ago
Disk space is cheap; IOPS aren't. Same stuff with RAM: it's cheap, but fast access isn't.
- tracker1 4y ago
  Even then, access is still significantly better on a local machine in a VM than it is on a shared server... You are effectively the only real user, generally speaking. The Gen4 NVME drive and 64gb+ ram on my local system is still better than shared server resources are generally going to be, short of dedicated (ie: expensive) server environments to do the same. I'm not a huge fan of VM development, generally speaking... that said, my current work setup is Windows + WSL + Rancher Desktop + VS Code (remoting extensions) for nearly everything. My windows terminal default is set to WSL, so it's pretty close to in the box... I can launch windows apps from the wsl environment... the integration is pretty seamless. In terms of performance, if you're stuck on an older Windows version (I am), then you can limit the max memory that the WSL environment gets, similar to a VM... I usually reserve 8-12gb for my host environment and give the rest to my dev environment. My personal desktop is Linux (Ubuntu-Budgie). My previous job the laptop was an M1 Max, which had faster ram/disk than the windows laptop for the current job, or my personal desktop (which is impressive to me). In the end, for most things, it's not significant enough to worry about... The aarch macs and i/o have been more problematic than wsl and other x86 environments... I think as rosetta support improves with qemu and docker, it will change and get significantly better. That said, with VS Code's remoting extensions, I can be working on a remote system nearly as effectively as local anyway... which is how I typically use my laptop. Wireguard to home, vs code w/ ssh to my personal desktop.

lstodd 4y ago

Disk space is cheap; IOPS aren't. Same stuff with RAM: it's cheap, but fast access isn't.

tracker1 4y ago
Even then, access is still significantly better on a local machine in a VM than it is on a shared server... You are effectively the only real user, generally speaking. The Gen4 NVME drive and 64gb+ ram on my local system is still better than shared server resources are generally going to be, short of dedicated (ie: expensive) server environments to do the same. I'm not a huge fan of VM development, generally speaking... that said, my current work setup is Windows + WSL + Rancher Desktop + VS Code (remoting extensions) for nearly everything. My windows terminal default is set to WSL, so it's pretty close to in the box... I can launch windows apps from the wsl environment... the integration is pretty seamless. In terms of performance, if you're stuck on an older Windows version (I am), then you can limit the max memory that the WSL environment gets, similar to a VM... I usually reserve 8-12gb for my host environment and give the rest to my dev environment. My personal desktop is Linux (Ubuntu-Budgie). My previous job the laptop was an M1 Max, which had faster ram/disk than the windows laptop for the current job, or my personal desktop (which is impressive to me). In the end, for most things, it's not significant enough to worry about... The aarch macs and i/o have been more problematic than wsl and other x86 environments... I think as rosetta support improves with qemu and docker, it will change and get significantly better. That said, with VS Code's remoting extensions, I can be working on a remote system nearly as effectively as local anyway... which is how I typically use my laptop. Wireguard to home, vs code w/ ssh to my personal desktop.