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What kind of workload favors the cloud over a powerful laptop, let alone a desktop machine? Surely the security is the only real advantage.

by jayd16 3y ago

mistrial9 3y ago
code close to data is the real one; managed services for companies that fire a lot of devs is a cynical one; always-on security updates probably big too. (at school they call me a "box hugger")
scarface_74 3y ago
Anytime that your bandwidth is low and you need to work with data hosted on your cloud provider or even pulling down Docker containers. I can also provision VMs that are much more powerful than any reasonable desktop temporarily. But most developers don’t use desktops any more do they? Even if you’re hybrid and were forced to return to office, you would still want a laptop.
- jayd16 3y ago
  If your bandwidth is that low, how would this remote desktop experience feel good? It won't.
  - scarface_74 3y ago
    I’ve done a Remote Desktop equivalent over a modem with PCAnywhere in late 90s. Even VNC which is horribly inefficient compared to better protocols is good enough.
fragmede 3y ago
A laptop or desktop machine is only one machine. It might have multiple cores and gobs of RAM but at its heart it's still one machine with all the limitations that brings. Working on the cloud with a big build cluster means when you hit compile it spawns a ton more jobs than a single machine ever could run, and then the binary gets delivered and runs in the right dev environment with all the decencies set up for you already. After running a fleet of automated testing on top of that.
- jayd16 3y ago
  I suppose if you have some kind of compilation that can saturate 100+ cores for so long it makes sense to send out the work to other machines then this could be useful. One machine is an advantage when we're thinking about the I/O overhead. I suppose giant Infinibuild projects exist so there's a market for some C++ devs perhaps. It still seems fairly niche to me. The aggressively parallel automated testing is nice but I don't see why that requires the IDE in the cloud.
baq 3y ago
Server cpus have way more cache and faster ram than laptops of the same generation. Also, people here usually mean ‘MacBook pro’ when they say ‘laptop’, and macOS is amazingly bad at docker when compared with native Linux, which is what you’ll likely be running on the remote workstation.

What kind of workload favors the cloud over a powerful laptop, let alone a desktop machine? Surely the security is the only real advantage.

by jayd16 3y ago

What kind of workload favors the cloud over a powerful laptop, let alone a desktop machine? Surely the security is the only real advantage.

mistrial9 3y ago

code close to data is the real one; managed services for companies that fire a lot of devs is a cynical one; always-on security updates probably big too. (at school they call me a "box hugger")

scarface_74 3y ago

Anytime that your bandwidth is low and you need to work with data hosted on your cloud provider or even pulling down Docker containers. I can also provision VMs that are much more powerful than any reasonable desktop temporarily. But most developers don’t use desktops any more do they? Even if you’re hybrid and were forced to return to office, you would still want a laptop.

jayd16 3y ago
If your bandwidth is that low, how would this remote desktop experience feel good? It won't.
- scarface_74 3y ago
  I’ve done a Remote Desktop equivalent over a modem with PCAnywhere in late 90s. Even VNC which is horribly inefficient compared to better protocols is good enough.

fragmede 3y ago

A laptop or desktop machine is only one machine. It might have multiple cores and gobs of RAM but at its heart it's still one machine with all the limitations that brings. Working on the cloud with a big build cluster means when you hit compile it spawns a ton more jobs than a single machine ever could run, and then the binary gets delivered and runs in the right dev environment with all the decencies set up for you already. After running a fleet of automated testing on top of that.

jayd16 3y ago
I suppose if you have some kind of compilation that can saturate 100+ cores for so long it makes sense to send out the work to other machines then this could be useful. One machine is an advantage when we're thinking about the I/O overhead. I suppose giant Infinibuild projects exist so there's a market for some C++ devs perhaps. It still seems fairly niche to me. The aggressively parallel automated testing is nice but I don't see why that requires the IDE in the cloud.

baq 3y ago

Server cpus have way more cache and faster ram than laptops of the same generation. Also, people here usually mean ‘MacBook pro’ when they say ‘laptop’, and macOS is amazingly bad at docker when compared with native Linux, which is what you’ll likely be running on the remote workstation.