Start Coding Faster with Remote Development Environments! [Devops Deployed Ep 10]

Remote development environments have matured immensely over the past few years, with Gitpod leading the charge. Today I am joined by Pauline Narvas and Chris Weichel of Gitpod!
We talk about remote dev environments, the importance of community for the company, and how the organization + technology operates.
I hope you enjoy the discussion!
---
Links:
- gitpod.io/
- gitpod.io/chat (discord)
Kubecon talks:
- kccncna2022.sched.com/event/1...
- kccncna2022.sched.com/event/1...
---
Timestamps:
00:00 - Introduction
01:12 - What is Gitpod?
02:12 - Why would I want a remote development environment?
05:32 - Using Gitpod for my blog
07:11 - Interacting with service dependencies
08:49 - Surprising customer usage
10:13 - Evolution of remote dev environments
11:58 - Comparison with GitHub Codespaces
14:34 - Why is community important within the DevX space?
20:35 - How does Gitpod being open source impact things?
24:31 - Community heroes program
30:24 - Working as a globally remote team
33:30 - Document transparency + request for comment process
35:57 - RFC guidelines
37:06 - Gitpod infrastructure and architecture
41:10 - Failure modes with stateful Kubernetes pods
42:50 - Speeding up image pulls
45:56 - Moving away from Helm towards Golang installer
48:48 - Security challenges and isolation
53:55 - How to get started with Gitpod?
54:31 - Using gitpod.io/# to try with any Github repo
---
Join the Community:
💬 Discord: discord.devopsdirective.com
💻 GitHub: github.com/sidpalas/devops-di...
🐥 Twitter: / sidpalas
👨‍💼 LinkedIn: / sid-palas
🌐 Website: devopsdirective.com
---
Community size at time of posting:
- Subscribers: 28340
- Channel Views: 885286

[@AleksandarIvanov69]

I am a huge evangelist for using containerization for development environment provisioning!
It is amazingly beneficial in comparison with traditional ways of setting up dev envs.
Even simply using a local dev env with Docker per project is a huge improvement.

[@DevOpsDirective]

Yeah, doing development inside of containers is a gamechanger once you overcome the initial setup and establish your workflows for iterating and debugging!

[@BR-lx7py]

Would it make sense to self host Pitpod locally on my laptop? Or is there a better solution for managing development environments locally? I'd be hesitant to have to rely on the cloud just to write code.

[@BR-lx7py]

And ouch re just starting to use PV-s. Relying on using pod local storage is scary.

[@DevOpsDirective]

If you want the benefits of reproduceable environments without the need to always be connected, I would probably suggest developing inside of a container (run locally with Docker / Podman).

[@DevOpsDirective]

Better late than never with the PVs!
Looks like they added support in May github.com/gitpod-io/gitpod/commit/301190db53305cfebb8f7150fd53f8a99a23adc1

[@Zimi485]

My conclusion after 16 months of using gitpod, and 6 months of gh codespaces: the thought behind them is legit but they are very limiting in what they offer in resources. I have projects compiling from scratch which take over 1h, gitpod just kills that prebuild, they don’t offer gpu support, cpu and ram are really lowend, gitpod does not allow privilege mode for flamegraph (due to its k8s architekture), same with running k3s debug clusters.
Don’t get me wrong. Containerized Workflows will be the future, but there are a hell lot of things they need to figure out and not just work around.

[@DevOpsDirective]

Thanks for sharing your experience! I haven't used it on any projects that require GPUs or have long build times like that.
It sounds like you are in favor of containerized dev environments, but are holding out until someone can meet your requirements.