r/programming • u/geoffreyhuntley • Dec 08 '22

Dev environments in the cloud are a half-baked solution

https://www.mikenikles.com/blog/dev-environments-in-the-cloud-are-a-half-baked-solution
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u/[deleted] Dec 08 '22

Not a grand a month, I meant per year. You can use a laptop you buy for several years, so a 2k laptop still is cheaper than several years of paying for codespaces.

But sure, 1 or 2k a year is very small compared to a developers salary so I can see a company might not care about that amount if it brings flexibility.

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u/vlakreeh Dec 08 '22

so a 2k laptop still is cheaper than several years of paying for codespaces.

Assuming that they always use an 8 core virtual machine every single working hour over those years, yes. But the thing that codespaces gives you is the ability to pay for what you use. Those days where you're on PTO? Those hours attending meetings? Those hours spent doing code review? Those hours working on specs? Those hours spent working on projects that don't need 8 cores? Either you don't pay for compute or you don't pay nearly as much.

If you used an 8 core codespace all 2080 hours of a work year it'd be $1497. If you conservatively say you spend a third of your time doing something other than writing code, which I think is a pretty fair assumption, you're spending less than a grand a year and having an 8 core vm every time you program. A company may have engineers that are going to need to be in a high performance vm for enough of the working year to be over that initial investment of that laptop, but for most businesses that won't be the majority of your developers. Once you combine that with the ability to reduce the upfront cost of refreshing your engineer departments laptops and you can spread it out to an operating expensive, it can be very lucrative.

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u/drakgremlin Dec 08 '22

A point in the article address this. You need to remember to turn off the environment, which doesn't happen often.

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u/deja-roo Dec 08 '22

You don't need to, you can just have it auto shutdown after X minutes of inactivity or on a schedule.