Stripe's Monorepo Developer Environment
blog.nelhage.com
blog.nelhage.com
I've been working on an ephemeral/preview environment operator for Kubernetes(https://github.com/pier-oliviert/sequencer) and as I could agree to a lot of things OP said.
I think dev boxes is really the way to go, specially with all the components that makes an application nowadays. But the latency/synchronization issue is a hard topic and it's full of tradeoff.
A developer's laptop always ends up being a bespoke environment (yes, Nix/Docker can help with that), and so, there's always a confidence boost when you get your changes up on a standalone environment. It gives you the proof that "hey things are working like I expected them to".
1. New shared builds update container images for applications that comprise the environment
2. Rather than a "devbox", devs use something like Docker Compose to utilize the images locally. Presumably this would be configured identically to the proposed devbox, except with something like a volume pointing to local code.
I'm interested in learning more about this. It seems like a way to get things done locally without involving too many cloud services. Is this how most people do it?
We steer clear of proprietary cloud services. In place of S3, we use minio.
The one sore spot I haven’t been able to solve yet is interactive debugging. k8s pushes you toward a model where all services need a pile of environment variables to run, so setting these up is pretty painful. In practice, though, all rapid iteration happens inside unit tests, so not having interactive debugging isn’t much of a productivity drag.
Even on my personal Linux desktop, I don't love developing in containers. It is very tedious to context switch between my local environment and the in-container environment, and I don't even consider myself the type with a super personalized setup.
So I don't consider local docker that much of an improvement over a remote devbox.
I think, with my proposed setup, you'd still do development on your local machine. The containers would only be there for the dependencies, and as a shell to execute your code. The container hosting the application under development would use a volume to point to the files on your local machine, but the container itself (with all its permissions and configuration) would match or nearly match what you plan for the production environment.
Considering the cost of a developers time, and you can do shenanigans to drive that even lower, this all feels totally reasonable.
For gp3, you only get 3000 IOPS and 125MBps throughout, without paying extra. That is orders of magnitude less than a local consumer-grade SSD.
Spec it up to 100k IOPS and 5000MBps and you're looking at nearly $800 a month. And that's still way less performance than you get with a local SSD.
Spec it up to 500k IOPS (approaching nvme SSD performance) and you're looking at $2500/month. Now you are on par with a consumer grade SSD.
Ive been deep in to implementing macOS CI workers on AWS where that isn't an option (or rather, it is an option, but it is unsupported and Amazon only buys Macs with the smallest possible SSD for the given configuration). So your options are to pay an arm and a leg for fast EBS, or pay an arm and a leg for a pro or max instance with larger internal SSD.
But on Linux there are better options.
It's darkly amusing how we have all these black-magic LLM coding assistants but we can't be reasonably assured of even 2000s level type-aware autocomplete.
What? For which languages are you talking about? For python, VSCode is leaps and bounds ahead of PyCharm if your project is well typed.
JetBrains offer a remote solution now though: https://www.jetbrains.com/remote-development/gateway/
JetBrains Projector and Gateway meanwhile lock up or outright crash several times an hour; text input and scrolling are not smooth.
I don't recall latency being a big problem in practice. In an organization like this, it's best to keep branches up to date with respect to master anyway, so the diffs from switching between branches should be small. There was a lot of work done to make all this quite performant and nice to use. The slowest part was always CI.
To me the root issue is the complexity of production environments has expanded to the point of impacting complexity in developer environments just to deploy or test - this is in conjunction with expanding complexity of developer environments just to develop - i.e. web pack.
For very large well resourced organizations like Stripe that actually operate at scale that complexity may very well be unavoidable. But most organizations are not Stripe. They should consider decreasing complexity instead of investing in complex tooling to wrangle it.
I'd go as far as to suggest both monorepos and dev-boxes are complex toolchains that many organizations should consider avoiding.
I'm not sure "monorepo" means the same thing to you as it does to me? To me, it just means "keep all the code in one repo, instead of trying to split things up into different repos."
To me, it's the thing that is the simple solution, it just means "a repo" -- the reason it gets a name is because it's unusual for large orgs with enormous codebases to have everything in one repo, it's unusual for them to do the simple thing that works fine for a small org with a normal codebase.
What is it you're suggesting a simple organization should do instead of a "monorepo"?
To me, and perhaps more from a Devops-like perspective, mono repo means "one repo many diverse deployment environments and artifacts often across multiple programming languages".
Im advocating against the Google/Stripe situation of a singular massive repo with complex build tools to make it function - like Bazel. I think sometimes small organizations get lured by ego and bad cost/benefit analysis into implementing such an architecture and it can tank entire product orgs in my experience (obviously not for Stripe, Google, etc.).
All the tooling is much easier to use when each application has its own repo.
Usually it stops being "simpler" at a level of organizational complexity or code size where it becomes a mess. The "monorepo" is the attempt to do what everyone was just doing anyway for simple orgs with simple codebases, but keep doing it at huge sizes.
It doesn't necessarily indicate much about the deployment model. You can have many separately releaseable things in one repo, and you can have one independently releaseable thing based on the sources of many repos.
Monorepos enable, but don't require, source-level co-evolution. Or maybe a better way to put it would be: many projects can have a shared history. Many-repos require independent source-level evolution. In the open source world there is no real choice: every project wants to be independent. The authors of a given project can do what they wish with it.
One weird thing to think about is that monorepos can accomodate many-repo style workflows. You can still develop projects completely independently within a single repo. Of course you can store separate projects on separate revisions, which would be weird. An even weirder approach would be having all projects in a given revision, but have totally independent builds, no single-version policy, no requirement for atomic compatibility, et cetera. These are all things that are often imposed for monorepos, but that are also not requirements. Basically, you can treat each project as independent even if their sources are stored together. I don't think there are any reasons to actually do this, of course.
I think this is the key phrase in what you've written. Quite often I've seen teams insist on separating things that cannot be released independently due to some form of coupling.
You end up with people talking about a particular "release" but not really knowing 100% what's in it and then discovering later that something is missing or included by mistake.
IMHO it's much easier to keep it all in a single repo and use the SHA value as a single source of truth when discussing what's in it. I don't really work on huge codebases though so your mileage may vary.
If your devs couldn’t be bothered to pin versions that was never a tooling problem. You don’t need a 500GB Git repository with every vendored component to know what’s in your code.
Our relatively simple prod architecture has 5 containers & a hosted database (so 6 containers when run locally), and any less would impact our product goals.
I still find running prod locally valuable, and is the most common way anyone does development here, but containers are fairly heavyweight when you want to run everything on one machine. It's also impossible if you have parts that need special accelerators to get good latency, etc.
If you're willing to build everything from scratch, you can have a framework that seamlessly lets you build conceptual services and then separate the physical deployment concerns, like Google has and sometimes even uses. But for the rest of us where we're clobbering together a bunch of different technologies, that's a luxury we can't really afford.
It became clear to me that cloud-only is not the way to go, but instead a local-first, cloud-optional approach.
https://mootoday.com/blog/dev-environments-in-the-cloud-are-...
I should be able to launch a local VM using the GitHub Desktop App just as easily as I can an Azure-hosted instance.
By running a Linux VM on your local machine you get a consistent environment that you can ssh to, remove the latency issues but you remove all the complexity of syncing that they’ve created.
That’s a setup that’s worked well for me for 15 years but maybe I’m missing some other benefit?
* 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.
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?
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.
In terms of needing to reset, it’s just a matter of git branch, push, reset, merge. In your world that sync complexity happens all the time, in mine just on reset.
Just to be clear, I think it’s interesting to have a healthy discussion about this to see where the tradeoffs are. Feels like the sort of thing where people try to emulate you and buy themselves a bunch of complexity where other options are reasonable.
I have no doubt Stripe does what makes sense for Stripe. I’d also wager than on balance it’s not the best option for most other teams.
PS thanks for chiming in. I appreciate the extra insights and context.
They do, but I can see those changes if I'm helping debug, and more importantly, we can set up the most important parts of the dev processes as services that we can update. We can't ssh into a VM on your laptop to do that.
For example, if you start a service on a stripe machine, you're sending an RPC to a dev-runner program that allocates as many ports as are necessary, updates a local envoy to make it routable, sets up a systemd unit to keep it running, and so forth. If I need to update that component, I just deploy it like anything else. If someone configures their host until that dev runner breaks, it fails a healthcheck and that's obvious to me in a support role.
> Just to be clear, I think it’s interesting to have a healthy discussion about this to see where the tradeoffs are. Feels like the sort of thing where people try to emulate you and buy themselves a bunch of complexity where other options are reasonable.
100% Agree! I think we've got something pretty cool, but this stuff is coming from a well-resourced team; keeping the infra for it all running is larger than many startups. There's tradeoffs involved: cost, user support, flexibility on the dev side (i.e. it's harder to add something to our servers than to test out a new kind of database on your local VM) come immediately to mind, but there are others.
There are startups doing lighter-weight, legacy-free versions of what we're doing that are worth exploring for organizations of any size. But remote dev isn't the right call for every company!
I’d anticipate you would be equally as able to ssh to VMs on dev laptops. That’s definitely a prerequisite for making this work in the same way as you’re currently doing.
The only difference between what you do and what I’m suggesting is the location of the VM. That itself creates some tradeoffs but I would expect absolutely everything inside the machine to be the same.
Our laptops don't receive connections, but even if they could, folks go on leave and turn them off for 9 months at a time, or they don't get updated for whatever reason, or other nutty stuff.
It's surprisingly common with a few thousand of them out there that laptop management code that removes old versions of a tool is itself removed after months, but laptops still pop up with the old version as folks turn them back on after a very long time, and the old tool lingers. The services the tools interact with have long since stopped working with the old version, and the laptop behaves in unpredictable ways.
This doesn't just apply to hypothetical VMs, but various CLI tools that we deploy to laptops, and we still have trouble there. The VMs are just one example, but a guiding principle for us been that the less that's on the laptop, the more control we have, and thus the better we can support users with issues.
[0]: https://github.com/Mic92/nixos-shell (not to be confused with nix-shell)
As just one reason why, many developers need to set up complex test data. We have tools to help with that, but they take time to run and each team has their own needs, so some of them still have manual steps when creating a new dev server. These devs tend to re-use their servers until our company-wide max age. Others, to be fair, spin up a new machine for every branch, multiple times per day, and spinning up a new VM might not be burdensome for them.
Yes, but forcing people to rebase is disruptive. Master moves several times per minute for us, so we don't want people needing to upgrade as the speed of git. Some things you have to rebase for: the code you're working on. Other things are the dev environment around your code, and you don't want that to be part of the checkout as much as possible. And as per my earlier comment, setting up a fresh VM can be quite expensive in terms of developer time if test data needs to be configured.
I think this is where our contexts may differ, and so we end up with different tradeoffs and choices :) The services running on our dev servers are updated dozens of times per day, and they roughly correspond to the non-code parts of a VM.
So if this was a problem back then, when the company had less than 1000 employees, I can't even imagine how hard would it be to get local dev working now
Not saying it's the wrong choice for you, but it's a choice, not a natural conclusion.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Those things are not bad by themselves. But people tend to do bad things with them, and those bad things spread remarkably well, disrupting every place they infect.
I've worked on projects that used a single repository for all the code written by different departments and projects where the same department could have multiple repositories. The later added insane amount of busy work, inordinate amount of errors, difficulty to investigate failures, excessive use of resources to house various permutations of systems created at different times with different combinations of components. The day-to-day in such projects could be described by developers waiting for the infra people to sort out the morning problems which mysteriously broke everything all at once so that no progress can be made.
This was in stark contrast to companies working on a single repository, where days when nothing worked would happen maybe once or twice a year.
I also lived through transitions from multiple repositories to a single repository and the other way around. In operational terms, I've never seen any beneficial effects of splitting a repository. Not in the short, nor in the long term. Complexity always went up, productivity went down, general satisfaction with project infrastructure would also go down with such a change. Department would start attacking and blaming the infra people for creating obstacles to their progress (while never explicitly mentioning the split repository because, usually that was a decision made by the same people complaining).
All of those are enabled by monorepos. And once people learn to do them, they seem to want to apply everywhere.
What? No. You live in a very sheltered world, my friend.
Even when it comes to the larger projects: I have multiple checkouts of GCC and Linux kernel on my laptop, and when I run du their existence doesn't even register in the first dozen results... Of course, proprietary projects tend to be on a bigger side due to putting a lot of not-strictly code-related stuff in a repository, but still... it would have to be billions LoC big to be prohibitively big for a typical laptop.
Not something I would ever own myself, though, so don't generalize.
P.S. The issue is compiling and running all this stuff. Just doing a 'git clone' and nothing else isn't developing.
https://moov.io/blog/education/moovs-approach-to-setup-and-t...
Buying the biggest MacBook available as a baseline criteria for being able to run a stack locally with Docker Compose does not exactly inspire confidence.
At my last company we switched our dev environment from Docker Compose to Nix on those same MacBooks and CPU usage when from 300% to <10% overnight.
I've used the FROM SCRATCH strat with nix:
https://mitchellh.com/writing/nix-with-dockerfiles
Is that how you implemented it?
could be a cool lightning talk (or part of something longer)
maybe it's a good piece for https://nixinthewild.com/ ?
I'm @capileigh on twitter and hachyderm.io if you wanna reach out separately -- here is good tho too
I can see there’s interest in the topic.
For now, could you elaborate on what exactly you mean by transitioning from docker-compose to Nix? Did you start using systemd to orchestrate services? Were you still using Docker containers? If so, did you build the images with Nix? Etc.
Short version of the Nix transition: the CLI tool would instead start services using nix-shell invocations behind pm2. So devs still had a way to start services from anywhere, get logs or process status with a command… but every app was running 100% natively.
At the time I was there, containers weren’t used in production (they were doing “App” deploys still) so there was no Docker target that was necessary/useful outside of the development environment.
Besides the performance benefit, microservices owning their development environment in-repo (instead of in another repo where the compose configs were defined) was a huge win.
By pm2 you mean https://www.npmjs.com/package/pm2 ?
several nixy devtools do some process management now
something we're trying in Flox is per-project services run /w process-compose. they automatically shutdown when all your activated shells exit, and it feels really cool
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
Or Guix, which has the advantage of a more pleasant language.
For teams where GNU/Linux is the primary development OS, Guix seems like a great choice.
- discoverability is a problem in Nix
- Guix encourages or "shepherds" more discoverable functions, modules, and abstractions
Then the language could be a problem.
Scheme and/or Lisp is literally the worst language choice for this problem domain.
I will admit I find guix to be much more verbose than Nix.
Which has pretty nice support across IDEs. For example - https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/devcontainers/containers
I set this up for my last company where we had all sorts of “works on my machine issues” and a needlessly painful onboarding experience. Local development became streamlined with this tooling BUT pre-apple silicon macs couldn’t handle running Docker like this. Glacially slow. We had a python monorepo with a bunch of services within it.
I am curious whether nix is an alternative / improvement for this. Was going down the nix road at first but an infrastructure team member steered me toward devcontainers instead and I’ve been pretty happy since!
pin is what causes rot, not what solves it.
If you have a Dockerfile from 5 years ago...well good luck building it today.
Nix is a better fit for this, and when you're using Nix you can also have Nix generated containers for deployment. I think you can also use a container with Nix in to provide the devcontainers interface to devs who don't have Nix installed locally, and have it in turn use Nix against your project's flake to set up its environment.
I have nixOS definitions that I can use to make a SD card image, overtake a running linux system via ssh, deploy to nixos via ssh, or deploy to a local system - all from one definition.
I feel better doing my "npm install"s in such an environment (of course it's still not a VM – but that's another topic).
When I read about nix, reproducibility is a goal, but security/isolation is a non-goal.
Generally, yes.
But you can use or put together something like this to run Nix inside a devcontainer instead of locally: https://github.com/xtruder/nix-devcontainer
So you can use them in conjunction (or alternation, if for some projects you're okay running without a container) without having to specify your development environments twice.
> I feel better doing my "npm install"s in such an environment (of course it's still not a VM – but that's another topic).
There are basically two kinds of integration you can do for a project with Nix, which I'll call deep and shallow. In shallow integration, you just have Nix provide the toolchain and then you build the project (manually, with a script, with a Makefile, whatever). This is pretty common and pretty easy, and gives you no protection from malicious NPM build scripts.
For deep integration, you can actually have Nix build your whole project. This has some downsides, like that it can't really handle incremental builds. It also imposes restrictions, like no network access by anything but Nix at build time, all packages are built by special build users with no homedirs and no perms to access anything, etc. When you do that kind of build/install, you do get some protection from crypto miners lurking in the NPM registry or PyPI or whatever.
As we've started to use it more extensively, we've also found that we want to add some enhancements, work out some bugs, and experiment with our own customizations out-of-tree, etc. I'm happy to report here on HN that devenv is well-documented and easy to extend for Nix users who have some experience with Nix module systems, and that Domen is really responsive to PRs. :)
And for the large majority of the companies/projects, if your project is so complex and heavy of resources that it doesn't fit on a modern laptop, the problem is not in the laptop, it's in the whole project and the culture and cargo-cult around "modern" software development.
Are there any more recently ex-Stripe folks here willing and able to comment on how Stripe's developer environment might have evolved since the OP left in 2019?
The biggest difference not mentioned is the article is that code is no longer kept on developer machines. The sync process described in the article was well-designed, but also was a fairly constant source of headaches. (For example, sometimes the file watcher would miss an update and the code on your remote machine would be broken in strange ways, and you'd have to recognize that it was a sync issue instead of an actual problem with your code.) As a result, the old devbox system was superseded by "remote devboxes", which also host the code. Engineers use VSCode remote development via SSH. It works shockingly well for a codebase the size of Stripe's.
There are actually several different monorepos at Stripe, which is a constant source of frustration. There have been lots of efforts to try to unify the codebase into a single git repo, but it was difficult for a lot of reasons, not the least of which was the "main" monorepo was already testing the limits of the solution used for git hosting.
Overall, maintaining good developer productivity is an extremely challenging problem. This is especially true for a company like Stripe, which is both too large to operate as a "small" company and too small to operate as a "big" company. Even with a well-funded team of lots of super talented people putting forth their best efforts, it's tough to keep all of the wheels fully greased.
Especially given VSCode, or Cursor ;), work so well via ssh.
To the engineers that don't want to use those IDE's it might suck temporarily, but that's it.
If you don't want remote devboxes, the regular devboxes still work. You just need to deal with the additional pain for syncing the files.
* Code is off of laptops and lives entirely on the dev server in many (but not all) cases. This has opened up a lot of use cases where devs can have multiple branches in flight at once.
* Big investments into bazel.
* Heavier investment into editor experiences. We find most developers are not as idiosyncratic in their editor choices as is commonly believed, and most want a pre-configured setup where jump-to-def and such all "just work".
I don't think it has to do with the dev environment itself, but I'd blame such thing for allowing to deliver "too fast" without thinking twice. Combine that with new blood in management and that's an accident waiting to happen *
They're the best in business still, but far from the well-designed easy-to-use API-first developer-friendly initial offering.
* Pure speculation based on very evident patterns
Though I am under the impression that things have gotten more sensical internally over the last year or so.
Note also that the devprod team has largely been shielded from the craziness, and may still be making good decisions (but I don't know what they are in this realm personally).
The worst problem is refining the ignore settings to ensure only code is synced preventing conflicts on derivative files and that some rule doesn’t overlap code file names.
We ran back then a similar project that I coined "Developer On-Demand" to tackle that same problem space. It's also what eventually lead me to find the magics of Nix and then build Flox.
I also agree with a lot of what was shared in other comments, while the problems we tackled at large orgs such as Facebook, Shopify, Uber, Google (to name a few teams I remember working with) and obviously also Stripe, certain areas of the pain are 100% universal regardless of team size.
On the Flox side, we're trying to help with a few of them today and many more hopefully in the soon future, very open for thoughts! Things like - simple to use Nix for each of your projects + keep deps and config up to date across everyones Macbooks and Linux boxes, etc -- even if you don't have a full AWS team and Language Server team ready to support.
I grew up with mainframes, minis and unix batch andor multiuser machines; for me this is the best way for business applications. I didn't particularly like the move to local all that much.
Among other things, Brisk allows you to run tests for your local code changes in the cloud (basically the pay mini test piece but for any test runner)
We also have a sync step much like the one described here and allow users to run one off commands (linters, tsc etc)
how does this work for interactive debugging?
I was going to ask the same about the system in TFA but I might as well ask you :)
That also avoids hacky sync scripts.
They don’t work from your local development env and also work in your CI env.
Mostly Brisk was designed to run your complete test suite on every codes save (ie local save) but it also works great from your CI.
We can run entire test suites in seconds which is performance you don’t get with those systems you named (which are generally for building/compiling)
I know Bazel is a build system which distributes builds among remote machines.
In fact using any computer language you can achieve these goals - you just need to program it.
So yes you could probably do all the things with all the things, but Basel does not solve this problem out of the box.
I wonder why stripe didn’t “just use Bazel”.
It's meaningless to say "we can run tests in seconds". You can't run my tests in seconds because they're single threaded and take 10 minutes. The important thing is the speedup, and they got a pretty good speedup. Arguably the nop build/test time is important too but it doesn't look like they measured that.
> Basel does not solve this problem out of the box.
Yes it does.
> I wonder why stripe didn’t “just use Bazel”.
In my experience it's because setting up Bazel is a) more work than setting up some ad-hoc build system (Make or CMake or whatever) and b) difficult to switch to retrospectively. So it only gets used where you have people who are experienced enough to know that you will wish you had started with it, and can convince the inexperienced people that it's worth the effort.
Usually you get too many inexperienced people saying "it's too difficult; we'll be fine with Make".
The one thing to know about Bazel is that it's both incredibly impressive, and also one of the least ergonomic pieces of software ever created. It's very clearly an internal project which was cleaned up and open sourced without any attempt to make it more usable outside of Google.
Bazel's kind of like Kubernetes in a way -- you don't actually get enough benefits to adopt it until you're at a certain point in the company lifecycle, and to get to that point you usually have to build other systems first. Then you have to gradually replace those systems with Bazel.
Err yes they do? Unless you mean something really specific that I'm not getting?
This is one of the biggest selling points of bazel-like build systems. Like to the extent that, for some changes, bazel can say "even though you changed this source file, I can be 100% certain that that change didn't affect any tests and so I will not run them"
> Finally: the development experience, of course, is only part of the story: the full lifecycle of code and features continues onward into CI and code review and ultimately through deployment into production, where it will be further observed, debugged, and evolved. Writing about those systems would require further posts at least this long.
In case the author is around: I would love to read those!
What Stripe’s configuration introduced is that they used a remote LS instead of the default local LS. Regardless, VS Code already defers LSP communication until it feels idle, and developers are used to that. So I wouldn’t expect a remote LS to significantly impact the level of inconsistency that developers already accept when using a local LS.
The choice to run dev environment far away from the files puts you in the position of needing to engineer your way past the inconsistency.
On the other hand, there was so much code that running everything on your own laptop was essentially out of the question. Doing a git pull after a long vacation locked up your dev box for a hot minute while it checked all the types—doing the same thing on your MacBook would be painful at best.
It comes up that we should make a devprod for front end folks to make the backend abstracted more.
Overall a lot of people prefer local dev because it gives them access to the entire stack, lets them run branch images easier, and has better performance than remote boxes.
https://moov.io/blog/education/moovs-approach-to-setup-and-t...
Bigger than shoppify's?
Also on a headcount level, Google tells me Shopify has 3,500 employees to Stripe's 9,500. Obviously neither company is compromised entirely of engineers, so this is a ballpark estimate.
GitHub feels like the real case where there might be a larger codebase. It's in the middle for employees (6,500), but it's existed longer than Stripe (though not as much longer as my gut feeling told me, interestingly)
I thought they used active_merchant
> currently amounting to over 15 million lines of code spread across 150,000 files
The monorepo has only gotten bigger over the last two years (source: I work at Stripe).
In general it was pretty rare, in my experience. The code bases were pretty well modularized.
Are they split into git-sub modules/ frameworks? Curious to know the development code review flow.
In our PR tooling, there's nothing that enforces/encourages scoping changes to a specific subset of any given repo. We generally encourage smaller PRs as a best practice, but a huge chunk of the benefit of a moonorepo is folks can make cross-cutting changes if/when necessary.
We have some custom goo on top of Github that manages the review flow. Specifically, we try to make it easy for folks to farm out reviews to the teams that own the code you're editing, so they don't have to hop in Slack and track down reviewers.
This is so important when deciding to re-invent the wheel. I've gotten bitten by this many times.
The author mentions the codebase was Ruby, but I didn't see if they talked about Rails.
Or if the framework is barely noticeable at that scale and doesn't really matter anymore. That's the impression I get for Instagram (which was built with Django).
From post, the problems that justified central dev boxes are roughly: 1. dependency / config mgmt / env drift on laptops 2. collaboration / debugging between engineers 3. compute scaling + optimization 4. supporting devs with updates and infra changes
The last one is particularly interesting to me, because supporting the dev env is separate engineering role/task that starts small and grows into teams of engineers supporting the environment.
I'm helping build Flox. We're working on these pain points by making environments (deps, vars, services, and builds) workable across all kinds of Mac/Linux laptops and servers. 1) a. Virtualize the pkg manager per-project b. Nix packages can install across OS/arch pretty well 2) Imperative actions like `flox install`/`upgrade` always edit a declarative env manifest.toml -- share it via git 3) less Docker VM's -- get more out of devteam Macbooks 4) reduce toil with a versioned, shareable envs --> less sending ad-hoc config and brew commands to people (as mentioned in the post.) Just `git pull && flox activate`.
I think on problem point #2, collab tools are advancing to where, pairing on features, bugs, and env issues can be done without central SSH. (ex: tmate, vscode liveshare, screensharing, etc) -- however, that does sort of fall apart on laptops for async debugging of env issues (ex: when devprod is in the US, and eng is in London). Having universal telemetry on ephemeral cloud dev-boxes with a registry and all of the other DNS and SSH goodies could be the kind of infra to aspire to as your small teams run into more big-team problems.
In the Stripe anecdote, adopting the centralized infra created new challenges that their devprod teams were dedicated to supporting: - international latency from central, US-based VM's - syncing code to the dev boxes (https://facebook.github.io/watchman/) - linting, formatting, generating configs (run it locally or serverside?) - a dev workflow CLI tool dedicated to dev-box workflows and sync'ing with watchman's clock - IaaS, registry, config, glue for all the servers
This is all very non-trivial work, but maybe there's a future where people can win some portability with Flox when they are small and grow into those new challenges when it's truly needed -- now their laptop environments just get a quick `flox activate` on some new, shiny servers or Cloud IDE's.
I really like the notes from the author on how useing Language Server Protocol across a high latency link has great optimizations that work along side the watchman sync for real-time code editing.
Is basically the summary for most mono/multi repo discussions, and a bunch of other related ones.
With a monorepo, it's common to have a team focused on tooling and maintaining the monorepo. The structure of the codebase lends itself to that
With a multirepo codebase, it's usually up tu different teams to do the work associated with "multirepo issues"— orchestrate releases, handle dependencies, dev environment setup, etc. So all that effort just kinda gets "tucked away" as overhead that each team assumes, and isn't quite as visible
If there's anything I'd say to low-level execs, the kind that end up with a few hundred developers under them, it's that mis-sizing the tooling team, in one way or the other, comes with total productivity penalties that will appear invisible, but will make everything expensive. Understanding how much of a developer's day is toil is very important, but few really try to figure that out.
I think a lot of this is just type of thing comes because with a monorepo you can actually see the problems to solve whereas you can easily end up with the same N engineers firefighting the same problems K times across all your polyrepos.
I understand that "engineers" may not mean "developers", it could DevOps, site reliability and all the bits and pieces that make up a large service provider, but over a 1000?
Can someone please enlighten me?
Won't be surprised to see that many would probably need a safari map or README documentation in every single folder to navigate a repository as large as stripes.
Sounds like an emergence of a new bad practice if you are having to praise how large your code base is.
No different to having thousands of smaller repos instead.
I personally dislike monorepos, for very niche, in-the-weeds operational reasons (as an infra person), but their ergonomics for DX cannot be understated.
Or are there any other aspects to the monorepo architecture that make it beneficial for large companies like that?
Just curious, I've never worked in such an environment myself.
In a standalone project, would you accept a change that is incompatible with other code in the project? For example, would you allow a colleague to change a function in a way that breaks the call sites? No, you probably would not.
The attitude within monorepo shops is that this level of rigour should be applied to the entire company. Nobody should be able to make a change anywhere if it would break anything elsewhere, or they should only be permitted to do so with intention. There are caveats to this, but that is the general idea.
- atomic PRs. All changes for a migration/feature living in one spot makes development much easier, especially when dealing with api changes and migrations
- single history. This is useful when debugging. A commit can more easily encapsulate the state of "the whole system" as opposed to a single part of it. This makes reverting, if necessary, easier
- environment consistency. updating the linting tool, formatting tool, UI library, etc is never a priority, so there's always drift, where an old repo gets stuck with old tools, dependencies and an old environment
- not shipping your org chart is easier when everyone can see and work work on the whole codebase, as easily as possible.
Example: Service A requires version 1.1 of libFoo and libFoo 1.1 requires version 0.1 of libBar. But Service A also directly uses libBar version 0.2. Now you have a conflict.
If libFoo and libBar are internal code stored in a monorepo they're automatically version-compatible because there is only one version of both.
When several of the world’s most successful software companies use this approach, it’s hard to argue that it’s inherently bad. Of course it’s sensible to discuss what lessons apply to smaller companies who don’t have the luxury of dedicated tooling teams supporting the monorepo and dev environment.
This can probably be fixed with trivial tuning. Just configuring Git to fetch only your branches would speed up the branch switching significantly.
> build and test are soul sucking experiences
Why? It doesn't have to be. If you are going to build the entire monorepo, then yes, but this should only happen when you are running CI, and even then you can break down the builds into smaller components.
> the whole MR becomes a nightmare to correctly review
Not if you set up code ownership properly. You also need to think what happens in case of emergencies, so having a selected list of "super users" and users with permissions to bypass reviews is important.
It sounds like this company wanted a monorepo, but nobody invested any money or time to actually think about developer productivity. When this happens, yes, of course it won't be good, because no project succeeds like this. The nice thing about a monorepo is that instead of 1,000 repos with tooling all over the place and no specialist to take care of them, you can have one repo with really good tooling and a team dedicated to just keep it running smoothly. But if nobody is actually taking care of the monorepo, it will rot just like any other codebase.
Is...documentation a bad thing?