[HN Gopher] Google Cloud Workstations managed development enviro...
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Google Cloud Workstations managed development environment is now GA
Author : rbanffy
Score : 54 points
Date : 2023-05-28 18:57 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (cloud.google.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (cloud.google.com)
| profwalkstr wrote:
| Shocked about the prices. Outside of AWS/Azure/GCP, many
| companies offer bare-metal dedicated server, with very high specs
| and would cost a lot less (around $40-60) per month. And they can
| be used as remote workstations.
|
| I myself use a Hetzner server as a remote workstation, which I
| connect via RDP. 12 cores Intel processor, 64 GB RAM, 2x1 TB HDD
| and 2x512 GB SSD for US$ 60. If there's any hardware issue it's
| their problem and they will fix it really quickly, so I don't
| have to worry about it.
|
| GCP/Azure/AWS prices are insane.
| rob-olmos wrote:
| Maybe just me but the cloud desktops pricing still isn't all that
| attractive for some businesses to make a big shift to using them,
| but also not terrible for some businesses that could use the
| extra security or cloud environment benefits:
|
| 8hrs per workday for a 4 vCPU and 16 GB RAM = $217.36 per
| month[1]
|
| 1: https://cloud.google.com/workstations/pricing#pricing-
| exampl...
| ttt3ts wrote:
| Also, that isn't exactly a powerful machine at 4 cores and 16GB
| of ram. Probably have to double it or what is the point?
| Security, maybe?
| 0x000xca0xfe wrote:
| Aren't vCPUs only hyperthreads? So this is actually similar
| to a dualcore processor?
| t3rabytes wrote:
| Cloud desktops move the numbers game from CapEx to OpEx.
|
| "CFOs love this one cool trick!"
| Takennickname wrote:
| You can buy a better specced laptop in a year.
| t3rabytes wrote:
| How many big corps in the US (I live in the US so that's my
| reference) are doing engineering hardware rotation at sub-2
| years? Most are likely to be 3.
| zapnuk wrote:
| The 4 vCPU 16 GB RAM range from 0.32-0.39 $/hour With 8 hours
| per day and 22 workdays per month its at most 68.64$.
|
| Your price includes the "workstation cluster fee", whatever
| that includes. Anyways this fee is fixed and does not increase
| for more workstations.
|
| 1 Dev => 68.64 + 144
|
| 100 Devs => 100 * 68.64 + 144
|
| I guess $70, or even $140 with better hardware, might be worth
| it in some szenarios.
|
| Personally, I'd never want to work with a company that doesn't
| trust me with a regular notebook.
| teeray wrote:
| These managed development environments are wonderful: consistent
| experience, secure, compliant, scalable, etc. That is, right up
| until it goes down. Then the productivity of your entire
| development team (and thus the output of the six figure salaries
| they are paid) drops to exactly zero while you bring up the
| managed development environment again.
| itake wrote:
| True. But I found stacks that are simple (and micro service)
| enough to run on my laptop to be much faster to develop on.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| How often do you think the entire global infrastructure or even
| a multi region service goes down?
|
| Using AWS as an example (because that's what I know), if Cloud
| 9 in us-east goes down and it's not the entire service, I just
| launch from another region, do a git clone and keep moving.
|
| It takes less than 2 minutes to bring up an environment if
| GCP's offering is similar to AWS's. I am assuming it will be.
| vsareto wrote:
| That's pretty much everything these days. But it isn't a big
| deal because most companies are not efficient enough to have
| downtime-from-dev-environment be a significant negative factor
| for any performance metric.
| teeray wrote:
| It is a big deal, because ad-hoc development environments
| don't break simultaneously. They can also be fixed by the
| developer using them. Even if, say, GitHub goes down, I can
| still email / DM a git am patch to a colleague for a code
| review (and they can send me a patch with comments).
|
| Choosing a shared environment is basically choosing to
| randomly give your development team a snow day. Maybe you're
| okay with that tradeoff, but when it rains it pours... prod
| likely will go down when you can't use the cloud dev
| machines.
| not_alexb wrote:
| Seems like it would also not be so wonderful if your remote
| employees are in rural areas (like the Joshua Tree area I
| reside in); I don't think I could handle the latency between
| keystrokes.
| yazaddaruvala wrote:
| I just set up IntelliJ to use my remote workstation for LSP
| and Build and Test, but all of the text editing happens
| locally.
|
| Specifically the files are also hosted remotely but the local
| text buffers are synced in the background not every
| keystroke.
| fragmede wrote:
| But the frontend runs locally via JavaScript, so while
| latency is real, there shouldn't be more between keystrokes
| than, say, VScode. (Because otherwise that would be
| intolerable.)
| disordinary wrote:
| Surely you have options though? In Rural NZ we have a choice
| between 4g which runs at about 50mbps and latency of about
| 15ms and starlink which runs at around 100mbps and has a
| latency of about 25ms.
|
| Both should be good enough for remote work.
| not_alexb wrote:
| I like how you're implying I haven't worked here for years
| and don't know the options. I have the best possible option
| and that system can be flaky for hours on end depending on
| a lot of factors.
| disordinary wrote:
| I wasn't implying that at all, more I was shocked at how
| a country like America doesn't have high speed broadband
| ubiquitously available. So it was more rhetorical than
| anything.
| not_alexb wrote:
| Fair enough. You have my apologies
| jmclnx wrote:
| Seems we are back to the mainframe era, or getting very close to
| it. I like to use my own tools, like emacs of vim, instead seems
| people will all be using the same tools (IDE/browser) for
| development if this goes mainstream.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| It's just a Linux environment. You can still use your own
| tools.
| bitwize wrote:
| I see this promulgated a lot by big corpos but little uptake or
| enthusiasm among actual developers, nor the companies that
| employ them.
|
| For compliance with various anti-data-leak standards we
| currently use a very janky remote development setup at work.
| We're working on improving this situation while maintaining
| compliance. The thing I keep hearing from devs is "wouldn't it
| be nice if we could develop pn our Macs?"
|
| I guess the bigcorps will have to deprecate and eventually stop
| development on local IDEs if they really want us to work this
| way, but I don't see that happening.
| mattlondon wrote:
| This supports VScode remote development, so your engineers
| can run VScode in their Mac's and access the remote.
|
| I have been doing VScode remote development for ages now and
| it is awesome. Even from a Chromebook
| ResearchCode wrote:
| If they don't mind the telemetry.
| NotEvil wrote:
| Not necessarily, it's open protocol with vim plugin.
| Mainly just ssh and running commands. And a part of ide
| running on server and client
| reaperducer wrote:
| _If they don 't mind the telemetry._
|
| Well, it's _Google_ Cloud Workstations. So you 're
| already dancing with a devil. Might as well dance with
| two.
| femboy wrote:
| How does the data / telemetry _Google_ collects on
| everyone compare with _Google Cloud_ data collected on
| paying customers?
| fragmede wrote:
| I mean if the telemetry means they know their shitty
| software crashes at this one point and then they fix
| that, I'm not sure I really mind.
| bitwize wrote:
| We already do VSCode remote development. We'd rather just
| hack on our Macs.
| api wrote:
| I've been calling cloud "mainframe 2.0" since the 2000s. There
| are certain scale, convenience, and security benefits to
| mainframes but they come at the price of privacy, autonomy,
| latency, and sometimes cost depending on your exact utilization
| pattern.
|
| Personally I find it very dystopian but I'm a child of the PC
| and early Internet era and the idea of personal computing
| always seemed magical.
|
| On cost it's like other capital assets: if you use it heavily
| and evenly it makes more sense to buy, but if you use it rarely
| or you need "burstable" use it's better to rent.
| riffic wrote:
| more people should recognize or write about the pendulum of
| centralization/decentralization in computing and impacts like
| this one.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _Seems we are back to the mainframe era, or getting very close
| to it._
|
| Or the thin clients that were all the rage for a week-and-a-
| half back in the late 90's.
|
| Salesdroid: "Why spend $3,000 on each computer for your office,
| when you can use our thin client, which is only $1,500,
| including keyboard and mouse?"
|
| Dell: - Starts shipping full computers for $299 -
| Animats wrote:
| Time-sharing! It's back!
| qwertox wrote:
| > I like to use my own tools, like emacs of vim
|
| So you just need to rent a VPS to get the same type of offering
| which is not a solution to IDE users.
|
| There's nothing bad about IDEs.
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| You can run an IDE on a VPS using x11 forwarding, or even
| with vnc/rdp
| cloudking wrote:
| This is really intended for development work on complex
| codebases with long running build/test times.
|
| Developing and running builds on a powerful remote system in a
| data center from your laptop is a game changer, as long as you
| have a good connection and low latency.
| fragmede wrote:
| Low latency definitely makes for a better experience, but
| since it's javascript running the browser, I assume typing
| into the editor textarea and most features will go as fast as
| javascript will go.
| [deleted]
| ransackdev wrote:
| Do you type faster than what javascript is able to handle?
| dijit wrote:
| I think you're forgetting that javascript in this context
| needs to be constantly re-evaluating the whole document;
| It must do this for syntax highlighting alone, not to
| mention other plugins, spell checkers and auto-completes
| gregschlom wrote:
| Depends on how much JS is trying to handle.
| jayd16 wrote:
| What kind of workload favors the cloud over a powerful
| laptop, let alone a desktop machine? Surely the security is
| the only real advantage.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| 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.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| 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")
| fragmede wrote:
| 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.
| DeTheBug wrote:
| I've been running my dev env on a bare metal for almost 2 years
| now, the setup was pretty much just and SSH client setup with
| VSCode remote SSH extension.
|
| Running on a Hetzner AX41-NVMe (6 cores, 64GB Ram, 2x512GB NVMe)
| for around $40ish. With GCP workstation for a e2-standard-4 (4
| cores, 16GB Ram) would cost $230 + $10/mo for the 100GB storage
|
| No hourly charge crap, can run all night do time and resource
| consuming tasks, huge storage space etc... all around good
| experience so far
| filleokus wrote:
| The first time I used a remote workstation for any period of time
| kinda spoiled me. It was beefier than my real laptop, I had super
| low latency. The experience overall was kinda nice actually,
| convenient to leave long running task active while I put the
| laptop in the bag. The laptop was always cool and quiet (unusual
| at the time considering the workloads).
|
| After that, they have always been ridiculously slow, locked down,
| goes into hibernation if you leave it unconnected for too long.
| Mostly running windows. Sometimes forced to use video
| conferencing through it, with horrendous audio/video latency.
| Almost impossible to be productive on.
|
| I think remote workstations, "done right" actually can be nice.
| Especially considering new editor integrations and/or e.g gpu
| intensive tasks. But I wonder if any org actually bothers to do
| it "right".
| vb6sp6 wrote:
| [dead]
| rejectfinite wrote:
| I guess this and Windows 365 is instead of Citrix or Thin
| Clients. It's not about price, it's about security, control and
| flexibility. Not meant to compete on price. Now I admit I kind of
| don't get it either.
| deanCommie wrote:
| This would've been really helpful for all those companies who are
| embracing remote work and so could quickly provision powerful
| development environment for all their remote devs who aren't
| being made to return to the office...................
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(page generated 2023-05-28 23:01 UTC)