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This is one of these things that I'm shocked there isn't more widepsread uptake on. It seems to win on some of the more important dimensions: ease of use/UX (if

This is one of these things that I'm shocked there isn't more widepsread uptake on. It seems to win on some of the more important dimensions: ease of use/UX (if executed well), power of machines -> faster iteration time for many workflows, improved priacy. I am not familiar with pricing for many of these offerings and I suspect it probably is pretty expensive. Even at megacorps where they have really good cloud dev environments, adoption is not universal. Many many people at my current employer have big under-desk workstations to do their day-to-day programming.

0cf8612b2e1e 3y ago
I would challenge if the size of the machine or responsiveness of the cloud is superior to local. Most people are not compiling Rust all day, but refreshing JavaScript. Which is to not even bring up the cost difference to rent or own a beefy piece of hardware. 64 gigs of ram is nothing for a local machine, but comes at a cloud premium. I do think there are some real wins in ensuring development environments are consistent and versioned. Knowing you can pick up the exact version used to develop the project without dedicated effort is attractive.
- esafak 3y ago
  > 64 gigs of ram is nothing for a local machine It's not nothing. Most developers are issued laptops, and a 64GB Macbook costs over $3000. Plus a CDE can be shared.
  - PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago
    Then don't buy a macbook, adding ram to a laptop isn't that expensive. You can get a 64 GB stick of DDR5 for $150.
  - traceroute66 3y ago
    > Most developers are issued laptops, and a 64GB Macbook costs over $3000. This is unfortunatley a nonsensical argument. As a company, you are employing a developer to write code. Both the company and the developer are happy when they are at their most productive. And to that extent, a $3,000 laptop is a perfectly reasonable "tool of the trade". Also don't forget companies can lease laptops if they don't have the cash floating around. Its the same thing in other sectors. For example, in Finance. A Bloomberg terminal comes in at $30,000 a year. But if you are, for example, a bond trader putting in multiple 6,7 or 8 figure orders on the market every day, then its no secret that Bloomberg has the monopoly on bond data and as a bond trader you absolutely need access to one as the tool of your trade. In addition, following COVID, most sensible companies have embraced WFH. And so what the company saves on office space they can spend on other things such as better laptops for developers.
    - esafak 3y ago
      Developers do not typically get to choose.
whoomp12341 3y ago
you mean I could transmit my commands at the super fast speed of my internet connection compared to nanoseconds? SIGN ME UP!
- quectophoton 3y ago
  I know you joke, but I've been in situations where my local environment was so slow that I'd rather program in vim at 200ms latency, because that still would have been better for my sanity.
willsmith72 3y ago
The power of machines is less than a 2021+ macbook unless you really pay up for your cloud workspace. Then it's worth the cost if you put the money there instead of towards a good laptop, but people still need some kind of computer. I get that spinning up a new dev env is really handy, but with something like Ansible it's possible to get a good dev environment on someone's local machine within hours, not much worse. What am I missing?
the8472 3y ago
It's a mix of many different things. At work we have very beefy workstations that just aren't available in those hardware specs from cloud vendors. They use workstation grade hardware (A6000 GPU, threadrippers) that offer better performance/price than similarly sized cloud offerings which use datacenter type hardware. To actually tick all same boxes you'd need to go for much larger instance types. Plus it would be questionable whether one could realize the scaling benefit of the cloud because those machines are more pets than cattle, killing them over night and bringing up a clean system the next day would likely upset dozens of different workflows and tweaked setups. And then the software expects network filesystems with low latency random access, not blob storage... They did the cost calculations, buying hardware is cheaper in the long run, including ops. And then there are customers that have extremely stringent security demands. Segregated networks, video surveillance, no data must leave the premises. Convincing them to move the data into the cloud might not be impossible but it would be a big recertification ordeal for one cloud vendor. And then we'd be locked into that vendor until we could get something else. And we have several such customers.

0cf8612b2e1e 3y ago

I would challenge if the size of the machine or responsiveness of the cloud is superior to local. Most people are not compiling Rust all day, but refreshing JavaScript. Which is to not even bring up the cost difference to rent or own a beefy piece of hardware. 64 gigs of ram is nothing for a local machine, but comes at a cloud premium. I do think there are some real wins in ensuring development environments are consistent and versioned. Knowing you can pick up the exact version used to develop the project without dedicated effort is attractive.

esafak 3y ago
> 64 gigs of ram is nothing for a local machine It's not nothing. Most developers are issued laptops, and a 64GB Macbook costs over $3000. Plus a CDE can be shared.
- PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago
  Then don't buy a macbook, adding ram to a laptop isn't that expensive. You can get a 64 GB stick of DDR5 for $150.
- traceroute66 3y ago
  > Most developers are issued laptops, and a 64GB Macbook costs over $3000. This is unfortunatley a nonsensical argument. As a company, you are employing a developer to write code. Both the company and the developer are happy when they are at their most productive. And to that extent, a $3,000 laptop is a perfectly reasonable "tool of the trade". Also don't forget companies can lease laptops if they don't have the cash floating around. Its the same thing in other sectors. For example, in Finance. A Bloomberg terminal comes in at $30,000 a year. But if you are, for example, a bond trader putting in multiple 6,7 or 8 figure orders on the market every day, then its no secret that Bloomberg has the monopoly on bond data and as a bond trader you absolutely need access to one as the tool of your trade. In addition, following COVID, most sensible companies have embraced WFH. And so what the company saves on office space they can spend on other things such as better laptops for developers.
  - esafak 3y ago
    Developers do not typically get to choose.

whoomp12341 3y ago

you mean I could transmit my commands at the super fast speed of my internet connection compared to nanoseconds? SIGN ME UP!

quectophoton 3y ago
I know you joke, but I've been in situations where my local environment was so slow that I'd rather program in vim at 200ms latency, because that still would have been better for my sanity.

willsmith72 3y ago

The power of machines is less than a 2021+ macbook unless you really pay up for your cloud workspace. Then it's worth the cost if you put the money there instead of towards a good laptop, but people still need some kind of computer. I get that spinning up a new dev env is really handy, but with something like Ansible it's possible to get a good dev environment on someone's local machine within hours, not much worse. What am I missing?

the8472 3y ago

It's a mix of many different things. At work we have very beefy workstations that just aren't available in those hardware specs from cloud vendors. They use workstation grade hardware (A6000 GPU, threadrippers) that offer better performance/price than similarly sized cloud offerings which use datacenter type hardware. To actually tick all same boxes you'd need to go for much larger instance types. Plus it would be questionable whether one could realize the scaling benefit of the cloud because those machines are more pets than cattle, killing them over night and bringing up a clean system the next day would likely upset dozens of different workflows and tweaked setups. And then the software expects network filesystems with low latency random access, not blob storage... They did the cost calculations, buying hardware is cheaper in the long run, including ops. And then there are customers that have extremely stringent security demands. Segregated networks, video surveillance, no data must leave the premises. Convincing them to move the data into the cloud might not be impossible but it would be a big recertification ordeal for one cloud vendor. And then we'd be locked into that vendor until we could get something else. And we have several such customers.