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This whole article is weird to me. I don't really understand the point of a "dev box" that's hosted in a DC and shared, at all - at least not the way they're p

This whole article is weird to me. I don't really understand the point of a "dev box" that's hosted in a DC and shared, at all - at least not the way they're painting it here. Hardware capabilities for even consumer level laptops and desktops have progressed much faster than average network connections. Having testing/preview/branch named environments in a DC? Sure. But this line: > They should be able to run any software they want inside their own workspaces without impacting each other. What does that even mean? Is this about someone working on a feature branch that uses some new dependency that needs to be installed? That's 100% the sort of thing your local development environment is for, until you're ready to push it to your hosted test/whatever environment. > But when it's running in a VM, the VM gobbles up as much memory as it can and, by itself, shows no inclination to give it back. Someone, anyone, tell me which hypervisor doesn't enforce a memory limit on VMs?

Terretta 3y ago
See VSCode ssh remote: https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/ssh-tutorial https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/ssh-tutorial See also: https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/devcontainers/containers https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/devcontainers/containers People pay for this. https://github.com/features/codespaces https://github.com/features/codespaces
- ajdude 3y ago
  This is exactly what I've been doing. I pay for a vps and just use vscode to do all of my work, I tend to switch between various computers and even various laptops, and it doesn't matter which one I'm on and just ssh into my dev station.
scarmig 3y ago
Enterprise likes it, because it gives them more visibility and control over what's going on in the dev box. That gives more angles to control against e.g. exfiltration threats. It also makes dev environments much more homogeneous: you worry less about client machines. In principle you could have a fleet of stateless Chromebooks whose main function is ssh and http, all connecting to identical virtualized desktops that are easily provisioned and deprovisioned.
- gspencley 3y ago
  I agree that enterprise likes it. Developers hate it, though. We are a lot that are very picky about our tools. Virtualization means images means standardization means everyone is using the IDE and tools that IT and "Enterprise" decides. It has it's pros and cons. But one of those cons is that it can make for an intolerable work environment. At least for me. I've gotten to the point where I now ask about dev environment during the interview process. If they mandate Mac or Visual Studio I'm not interested (not trying to start a flame war, those are my personal preferences). I know that certain organizations need their control for auditing, security and remote wipe reasons, and that is understandable. I'll just go work elsewhere. It's fine.
  - debosmit 3y ago
    This is really not true - a poor implementation shouldn't dictate the direction of the "remote development" space. Sure, IT and security have their requirements, but primary requirement is to make the developers happy and provide them with reproducible dev environments. I used to work at Uber and what we ended up doing with devpod (https://www.uber.com/blog/devpod-improving-developer-productivity-at-uber/ https://www.uber.com/blog/devpod-improving-developer-product...) was to enable the popular IDEs to connect to these remote environments - all the dotfiles etc etc were persisted so it literally felt like the local IDE, just way faster. Admittedly, it costs a bunch of money to build internally, but there's a path to having people be happy with dev environments. (we collected data on what IDEs to prioritize based on surveys)
    - fragmede 3y ago
      Why use a survey and not just ask the endpoints directly? Presumably the laptops are managed and are running something like Santa on them. Would remove bias to get the data this way.
      - debosmit 3y ago
        yea - we had that too (good for understanding how laptop tooling worked, and what areas were starting to show latencies and therefore, needed to be worked on) surveys were anonymized
black3r 3y ago
If you work from the same computer in the same place everyday there are no advantages to having a remote box... If you work 50:50 from office & home you start getting annoyed by either having a different environment at home & work or by having to drag your laptop around with you... If you're a digital nomad wanting to work while travelling through "cheaper" parts of the world it's less worrying to carry around a $500 laptop than a $4000 laptop...
- stephenr 3y ago
  > you start getting annoyed ... by having to drag your laptop around with you I'm sorry but you just lost me completely. If you're not taking a laptop with you, what's the fucking point of having a laptop?
  - fbdab103 3y ago
    So people can see the stickers of the conferences you have attended?
  - black3r 3y ago
    it was an either/or statement.., if you don't have a remote devbox your choice is either having to deal with the fact that your home work environment is different from your work environment at the office and you have to set up lots of things twice and encounter some weird issues even if you try to keep them in sync (more problematic for less experienced devs in fast moving companies), or your choice is using a laptop and carrying it with you even if you do have a more powerful PC at home, have the option of having a more powerful desktop at work and would otherwise prefer desktops to laptops...
    - stephenr 3y ago
      Automated reproducible VMs are pretty straight forward with vagrant, and "setup the same thing from a defined set of instructions" is basically the definition of docker. But if you're not happy with that scenario - I don't know maybe your work will be drastically affected if you have two different but identical VMs - tb3/4 external ssds are perfect for storing VMs on, so that you can move between machines at the drop of a hat. I've been doing this for about 5 years as a safety valve to my desktop having a fault: I can just unplug the drive and plug it into the laptop or a new machine and the VMs are all there exactly as I left them.
ransackdev 3y ago
> Someone, anyone, tell me which hypervisor doesn't enforce a memory limit on VMs? Not to mention the popular virtualization platforms like kvm, vmware, and hyper-v all support ballooning[1][2] where you can define a base amount of memory and a max, and when the guest garbage collects its heap within the vm the memory is reclaimed by the hypervisor. This also allows overcommitting to better utilize the resources that would otherwise site mostly idle, and trust me every cloud provider overcommits their hypervisors, I used to work for a major one but anyone can check the cpu steal time in top and see how thrashed their host is 1. https://www.linux-kvm.org/page/Projects/auto-ballooning https://www.linux-kvm.org/page/Projects/auto-ballooning 2. https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Dynamic_Memory_Management#Ballooning https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Dynamic_Memory_Management#Ballo...
halfcat 3y ago
> Someone, anyone, tell me which hypervisor doesn't enforce a memory limit on VMs? They don’t mean the memory usage is allowed to grow indefinitely. They mean, if your laptop has 32 GB RAM, and if your OS and apps consume 20 GB, it’s using 20 GB RAM. If a VM has 32 GB of vRAM allocated, and the OS is aggressively caching, that VM will consume 32 GB of RAM on the physical host, even if only 20 GB of vRAM is being used within that guest VM. Of course, every good hypervisor will have a way to prevent this from happening, so the article does seem disingenuous on this point.
laurencerowe 3y ago
The advantage of docker based developer workflows is that it makes things repeatable. If you’ve ever tried to support a team installing their own dependencies you’ll understand the pain! If everyone is working in docker in VS Code it’s not a huge jump to have them develop in remote VMs. Now your devs can get setup instantaneously and can use thin and light MacBook Airs instead of heavy MacBook Pros.

Terretta 3y ago

See VSCode ssh remote: https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/ssh-tutorial https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/ssh-tutorial See also: https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/devcontainers/containers https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/devcontainers/containers People pay for this. https://github.com/features/codespaces https://github.com/features/codespaces

ajdude 3y ago
This is exactly what I've been doing. I pay for a vps and just use vscode to do all of my work, I tend to switch between various computers and even various laptops, and it doesn't matter which one I'm on and just ssh into my dev station.

scarmig 3y ago

Enterprise likes it, because it gives them more visibility and control over what's going on in the dev box. That gives more angles to control against e.g. exfiltration threats. It also makes dev environments much more homogeneous: you worry less about client machines. In principle you could have a fleet of stateless Chromebooks whose main function is ssh and http, all connecting to identical virtualized desktops that are easily provisioned and deprovisioned.

gspencley 3y ago
I agree that enterprise likes it. Developers hate it, though. We are a lot that are very picky about our tools. Virtualization means images means standardization means everyone is using the IDE and tools that IT and "Enterprise" decides. It has it's pros and cons. But one of those cons is that it can make for an intolerable work environment. At least for me. I've gotten to the point where I now ask about dev environment during the interview process. If they mandate Mac or Visual Studio I'm not interested (not trying to start a flame war, those are my personal preferences). I know that certain organizations need their control for auditing, security and remote wipe reasons, and that is understandable. I'll just go work elsewhere. It's fine.
- debosmit 3y ago
  This is really not true - a poor implementation shouldn't dictate the direction of the "remote development" space. Sure, IT and security have their requirements, but primary requirement is to make the developers happy and provide them with reproducible dev environments. I used to work at Uber and what we ended up doing with devpod (https://www.uber.com/blog/devpod-improving-developer-productivity-at-uber/ https://www.uber.com/blog/devpod-improving-developer-product...) was to enable the popular IDEs to connect to these remote environments - all the dotfiles etc etc were persisted so it literally felt like the local IDE, just way faster. Admittedly, it costs a bunch of money to build internally, but there's a path to having people be happy with dev environments. (we collected data on what IDEs to prioritize based on surveys)
  - fragmede 3y ago
    Why use a survey and not just ask the endpoints directly? Presumably the laptops are managed and are running something like Santa on them. Would remove bias to get the data this way.
    - debosmit 3y ago
      yea - we had that too (good for understanding how laptop tooling worked, and what areas were starting to show latencies and therefore, needed to be worked on) surveys were anonymized

black3r 3y ago

If you work from the same computer in the same place everyday there are no advantages to having a remote box... If you work 50:50 from office & home you start getting annoyed by either having a different environment at home & work or by having to drag your laptop around with you... If you're a digital nomad wanting to work while travelling through "cheaper" parts of the world it's less worrying to carry around a $500 laptop than a $4000 laptop...

stephenr 3y ago
> you start getting annoyed ... by having to drag your laptop around with you I'm sorry but you just lost me completely. If you're not taking a laptop with you, what's the fucking point of having a laptop?
- fbdab103 3y ago
  So people can see the stickers of the conferences you have attended?
- black3r 3y ago
  it was an either/or statement.., if you don't have a remote devbox your choice is either having to deal with the fact that your home work environment is different from your work environment at the office and you have to set up lots of things twice and encounter some weird issues even if you try to keep them in sync (more problematic for less experienced devs in fast moving companies), or your choice is using a laptop and carrying it with you even if you do have a more powerful PC at home, have the option of having a more powerful desktop at work and would otherwise prefer desktops to laptops...
  - stephenr 3y ago
    Automated reproducible VMs are pretty straight forward with vagrant, and "setup the same thing from a defined set of instructions" is basically the definition of docker. But if you're not happy with that scenario - I don't know maybe your work will be drastically affected if you have two different but identical VMs - tb3/4 external ssds are perfect for storing VMs on, so that you can move between machines at the drop of a hat. I've been doing this for about 5 years as a safety valve to my desktop having a fault: I can just unplug the drive and plug it into the laptop or a new machine and the VMs are all there exactly as I left them.

ransackdev 3y ago

> Someone, anyone, tell me which hypervisor doesn't enforce a memory limit on VMs? Not to mention the popular virtualization platforms like kvm, vmware, and hyper-v all support ballooning[1][2] where you can define a base amount of memory and a max, and when the guest garbage collects its heap within the vm the memory is reclaimed by the hypervisor. This also allows overcommitting to better utilize the resources that would otherwise site mostly idle, and trust me every cloud provider overcommits their hypervisors, I used to work for a major one but anyone can check the cpu steal time in top and see how thrashed their host is 1. https://www.linux-kvm.org/page/Projects/auto-ballooning https://www.linux-kvm.org/page/Projects/auto-ballooning 2. https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Dynamic_Memory_Management#Ballooning https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Dynamic_Memory_Management#Ballo...

halfcat 3y ago

> Someone, anyone, tell me which hypervisor doesn't enforce a memory limit on VMs? They don’t mean the memory usage is allowed to grow indefinitely. They mean, if your laptop has 32 GB RAM, and if your OS and apps consume 20 GB, it’s using 20 GB RAM. If a VM has 32 GB of vRAM allocated, and the OS is aggressively caching, that VM will consume 32 GB of RAM on the physical host, even if only 20 GB of vRAM is being used within that guest VM. Of course, every good hypervisor will have a way to prevent this from happening, so the article does seem disingenuous on this point.

laurencerowe 3y ago

The advantage of docker based developer workflows is that it makes things repeatable. If you’ve ever tried to support a team installing their own dependencies you’ll understand the pain! If everyone is working in docker in VS Code it’s not a huge jump to have them develop in remote VMs. Now your devs can get setup instantaneously and can use thin and light MacBook Airs instead of heavy MacBook Pros.