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Maybe a silly question, but why all this engineering effort when you could host the dev environment locally? By running a Linux VM on your local machine you ge

• yeswecatan 2y ago
  I came to ask the same thing. We use docker-compose to describe all our services which works fine.
  • JasonSage 2y ago
    This does not scale to a large number of services with a certain amount of RAM/processing per service.
    • aidos 2y ago
      You could still run the proxy they have that lazy boots services - that’s a nice optimisation. I don’t think that many places are in a position where the machines would struggle. They didn’t mention that in the article as a concern - just that they struggled to keep environments consistent (brew install implies some are running on osx etc).
      • sulam 2y ago
        I think it’s safe to assume that for something with the scale and complexity of Stripe, it would be a tall order to run all the necessary services on your laptop, even stubs of them. They may not even do that on the dev boxes, I’d be a little surprised if they didn’t actually use prod services in some cases, or a canary at any rate, to avoid the hassles of having to maintain on-call for what is essentially a test environment.
        • aidos 2y ago
          I don’t know that’s safe to assume. Maybe it is an issue but it was not one of the issues they talk about in the article and not one of the design goals of the system. They have the proxy / lazy start system exactly so they can limit the services running. That suggests to me that they don’t end up needing them all the time to get things done.
    • recroad 2y ago
      If you have 100 services in your org, I don't have to have 100 running at the same time in your local dev machine. I only run the 5 I need for the feature I'm working on.
      • Daishiman 2y ago
        I've been on this path and as soon as you work on a couple of concurrent branches you end up having 20 containers in your machine and setting these up to run successfully ends up being its own special PITA.
        • layer8 2y ago
          What exactly are the problems created by having a larger number of containers? Since you’re mentioning branches, these presumably don’t have to all run concurrently, i.e, you’re not talking about resource limitations.
          • Daishiman 2y ago
            Large features can require changing protocols or altering schemas in multiple services. Different workflows can require different services, etc. Keep track of different service versions in a couple branchs (not unusual IMO) and it just becomes messy.
            • layer8 2y ago
              What does this have to do with running locally vs. on a dev server? You have to properly manage versions in any case.
      • adamdecaf 2y ago
        We have 100 Go services (with redpanda) and a few databases in docker-compose on dev laptops. It works well when and we buy the biggest memory MacBooks available. https://moov.io/blog/education/moovs-approach-to-setup-and-testing/ https://moov.io/blog/education/moovs-approach-to-setup-and-t...
• n0us 2y ago
  You're limited by the resources available to you on your local laptop and when you close that laptop the dev environment stops running. Remote dev environments are more costly and complicated to maintain but they can be shared, can scale vertically (or horizontally) on demand, can persist when you exit them, and managing access to various internal services from dev environments can in some cases be simpler. It also centralizes dev environment management to the platform team that owns them and provides them as a service which cuts down on support tickets related to broken dev environments. There are certainly some trade offs though and for most companies a local VM or docker compose file will be a better choice.
  • giido 2y ago
    Also tends to security advantages to mitigate/manage dev risks. Typically hosts will have security tooling installed (AV, EDR, etc) that may not be installed on local VMs, hosts are ephemeral so quickly created and destroyed, network restrictions, etc.
  • underdeserver 2y ago
    Most local laptops are much stronger than is needed to run the entire stack of your average startup with no resource issues. And the dev environment stops running when you close the laptop, but you also don't need it since you're not developing. Not saying it can work for absolutely all cases but it's definitely good enough for a lot of cases.
    • anthonypasq 2y ago
      ... this is an article about Stripe, not your average startup
      • underdeserver 2y ago
        And yet the discussion can go beyond that.
  • crabbone 2y ago
    Not even once did I want to share my dev. environment, nor did anyone want to share mine. We are talking about 25-odd years of being a developer. Never in my life did I want to scale my dev. environment vertically or horizontally or in any other direction. Unless you work on a calculator, I don't know why would you need that. I have no problems with my environment stopping when I close my laptop. Why is this a problem for anyone? For overwhelming majority of programming projects out there they fit on a programmer's laptop just fine. The rare exceptions are the projects which require very specialized equipment not available to the developers. In any case, a simulator would be usually a preferable way to dealing with this, and the actual equipment would be only accessed for testing, not for development. Definitely not as a routine development process. Never in my life did I want development process to be centralized. All developers have different habits, tastes and preferences. Last thing I want is to have centralized management of all environments which would create unwanted uniformity. I've been only once in a company that tried to institute a centrally-managed development environment in the way you describe, and I just couldn't cope with it. I quit after few month of misery. The most upsetting aspect about these efforts is stupidity. These efforts solve no problems, but add a lot of pain that is felt continuously, all the time you have to do anything work-related.
• bhuga 2y ago
  I work on this at Stripe. There's a lot of reasons: * Local dev has laptop-based state that is hard to keep in sync for everyone. Broken laptops are _really hard_ to debug as opposed to cloud servers I can deploy dev management software to. I can safely say the oldest version of software that's in my cloud; the laptops skew across literally years of versions of dev tools despite a talented corpeng team managing them. * Our cloud servers have a lot more horsepower than a laptop, which is important if a dev's current task involves multiple services. * With a server, I can get detailed telemetry out of how devs work and what they actually wait on that help me understand what to work on next; I have to have pretty invasive spyware on laptops to do the same. * Servers in our QA environment can interact with QA services in a way that is hard for a laptop to do. Some of these are "real services", others are incredibly important to dev itself, such as bazel caches. There's other things; this is an abbreviated list. If a linux VM works for you, keep working! But we have not been able to scale a thousands-of-devs experience on laptops.
  • aidos 2y ago
    I want to double check we’re talking about the same thing here. I’m referring to running everything inside a single VM that you would have total access to. It could have telemetry, you’d know versions etc. I wonder if there’s some confusion around what I’m suggesting given your points above. I’m sure there are a bunch of things that make it the right choice for Stripe. Obviously if you just have too many things to run at a time and a dev laptop can’t handle it then it’s a dealbreaker. What’s the size of the cloud instances you have to run on?
    • drited 2y ago
      I see in another comment thread you mentioned downloading the VM iso, presumably from a central source. Your comment in this thread didn't mention that so perhaps this answer (incorrectly) assumes the VM you are talking about was locally maintained/created?
    • bhuga 2y ago
      > I’m referring to running everything inside a single VM that you would have total access to. It could have telemetry, you’d know versions etc. I wonder if there’s some confusion around what I’m suggesting given your points above. I don't think there's confusion. I only have total access when the VM is provisioned, but I need to update the dev machine constantly. Part of what makes a VM work well is that you can make changes and they're sticky. Folks will edit stuff in /etc, add dotfiles, add little cron jobs, build weird little SSH tunnels, whatever. You say "I can know versions", but with a VM, I can't! Devs will run update stuff locally. As the person who "deploys" the VM, I'm left in a weird spot after you've made those changes. If I want to update everyone's VM, I blow away your changes (and potentially even the branches you're working on!). I can't update anything on it without destroying it. In constrast, the dev servers update constantly. There's a dozen moving parts on them and most of them deploy several times a day without downtime. There's a maximum host lifetime and well-documented hooks for how to customize a server when it's created, so it's clear how devs need to work with them for their customizations and what the expectations are. I guess its possible you could have a policy about when the dev VM is reset and get developers used to it? But I think that would be taking away a lot of the good parts of a VM when looking at the tradeoffs. > What’s the size of the cloud instances you have to run on? We have a range of options devs can choose, but I don't think any of them are smaller than a high-end laptop.
• crabbone 2y ago
  Working in a configuration where your development environment isn't on your computer is always a huge downgrade. Work with VM? -- sooner or later you'll have problems with forwarding your keyboard input to the VM. Work with containers? -- no good way to save state, no good way to guarantee all containers are in sync etc. God forbid any sort of Web browser-based solution. The number of times I accidentally closed the tab or did something else unintentionally because of key mapping that's impossible to modify... However, in some situations you must endure the pain of doing this. For example, regulatory reasons. Some organizations will not allow you to access their data anywhere but on some cloud VM they give you very botched and very limited control over. While, technically, these are usually easy to side-step, you are legally required to not move the data outside of the boundaries defined for you by the IT. And so you are stuck in this miserable situation, trying to engineer some semblance of a decent utility set in a hostile environment. Another example is when the infrastructure of your project is too vast to be meaningfully reduced to your laptop, and a lot of your work is exploratory in nature. I.e. instead of typical write-compile-upload-test you are mostly modifying stuff on the system you are working on to see how it responds. This is kind of how my day-to-day goes: someone reported they fail to install or use one of the utilities we provide in a particular AWS region with some specific network settings etc. They'd give me a tunnel to the affected cluster, and I'd have some hours to spend there investigating the problem and looking for possible immediate and long-term solutions. So, you are essentially working in a tech-support role, but you also have to write code, debug it, sometimes compile it etc.
  • aidos 2y ago
    Sounds like you’re talking about something else (more like the Citrix / virtual desktop type model - I don’t know the name). The idea here is that you use a VM (cloud or local) to run your compute. Most people can run it in the background without explicitly connecting to it.
    • crabbone 2y ago
      What you describe isn't a development process in a remote environment. You are testing on some remote compute resource. Testing is a non-essential part of development, so, in a sense it "doesn't count" that you test somewhere else -- you cannot call it "developing in a remote environment". Otherwise, you could say that, for example, reading documentation on a Web page you are doing "development in a remote environment" because, well... most likely that Web page isn't hosted on your laptop. The essential and mandatory part of development is that a program is written. If you write the program on your laptop, you aren't doing "remote development", no matter where other tools you use for development are running.
• simonw 2y ago
  In my opinion the single most important feature of any development environment is a reliable “reset” button. The amount of time companies lose to broken development environments is incredible. A developer can easily lose half a day (or more) of productive time. With cloud environments it’s much easier to offer a “just give me a brand new environment that works” button somewhere. That’s incredibly valuable.
  • aidos 2y ago
    For sure, but, a VM has that feature too. They have to run some services directly on the laptop to handle the code syncing. So if you accept a certain amount of “need to do some dev machine setup” as a cost, installing Parallels and running a script to download an iso is a pretty small surface area that allows for a full reset. I don’t doubt that Stripe have a setup that works well for them them but I also bet they could have gone done a different path that also worked well and I suspect that other path (local VMs) is a better fit for most other smaller teams.
    • sam_perez 2y ago
      To be fair, it seems like the cloud development environment choice was driven by the scale of Stripe's organization.
• dheera 2y ago
  > By running a Linux VM Or just run Linux on your local machine as the OS. I don't get the obsession with Macs as dev workstations for companies whose products run on Linux.
  • philwelch 2y ago
    Especially when they don’t even deploy to ARM servers.
  • uncanneyvalley 2y ago
    The year of Linux on the laptop has yet to arrive for most of us. Windows and MacOS both offer better battery life, if for no other reason (and there are usually other reasons, like suspend/wake issues, graphics driver woes, etc.)
  • globular-toast 2y ago
    Agreed. It's so much simpler when people run Linux locally too. Most of our dev environment problems are from people who don't. When you run it locally you also get good at using it which, unsurprisingly, helps a lot when you have to figure out a problem with the deployed version. Learning MacOS/Windows is kinda pointless knowledge in the long run.
• trevor-e 2y ago
  From what I remember (left Stripe in late 2022) much of Stripe's codebase was/is a Ruby tangled "big ball of mud" monorepo due to lack of proper modules. Basically a lot of the core modules all imported code from each other with little layering so you couldn't deploy a lean service without pulling in almost all of the monorepo code. And due to the way imports worked it would load a ton of this code a runtime. This meant that even a simple service would have extremely high memory usage and be unsuitable for a local dev environment where you have N of these bloated services running at the same time. There was a big refactoring effort to get "strict modules" in place to cut down on this bloat which had some promising results. I'm not an expert in this area but I believe this was the gist of it.