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Comment by dbish | Hacker News Reader

I think there is a market here. I don't use this service, but instead use an EC2 instance as my developer box (for personal projects) and I do like being able to easily move between multiple machines, no matter where I am and easily spin up another instance when I want to start fresh or try out other setups like having a more powerful machine or something with a GPU. At work (I work at AWS) most people do the same for their developer machines and don't have physical desktops, just using their laptops for access or lightweight local development.

A service that makes setting up and managing those developer machines easier for folks who don't want to learn or fiddle with AWS options would be valuable.

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> learn or fiddle with AWS options

AFAIK if you only want a box to act as a dev environment, that would not be much work beyond ec2:run-instance? Is there anything obvious that I'm missing?

Yeah, but even for fairly technical people, there's a lot more of a learning curve there than there needs to be (starting up an instance is easy, getting all the security stuff set up is more of a pain). Having something which is easier to manage without all the complexity of AWS seems reasonable.

standard installations (set yourself up with the tools you want running on the machine), keeping track of and managing the security parts (security keys/access credentials), mapping to any static IP or domain name you may want to use for ease of access, and other niceties could make the process smoother if you were purely focused on the developer workflow

also when you're testing things out on the machine you have to know how to change security settings for opening ports and providing access externally. These aren't too complicated to do, but just generally having simple tools/UI for making this simpler could be useful. for example, if you're a flask dev you may want to just run a site "locally" and make a few setting changes before being able to access your site. i've helped friends with how to do that before

What EC2 instance type do you use for a typical developer machine?

M4.2xl and C5.xl are the most common.

https://aws.amazon.com/workspaces/ perhaps? Seems like that is the existing AWS option similar to this offering. Would neat to see a comparison between the two.

workspaces (in my personal point of view) would cover a chunk of what this company is talking about but doesn't tie into or focus on the developer workflow. that product is perfect for general office machines, but developers likely want the option for more control and need different features

What setup are you using to “easily move between machines”? Are we talking CLI here?

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