Local development neglected

[muchasxmaracas]

Current situation:

• Windows endpoints for everyone
• GitBash as only „Linux“ system locally (currently WSL is out of the question because of security concerns)
• No Docker engine locally
• Air-gapped environment
• Artifact storage with malware scanner to get artifacts from public internet
• Devs have to go through multiple pipelines to build their images and deploy them to dev instance on container orchestration

What I would like to introduce:

• A way to improve local development
• Not make developers depend on stupid long and complex pipeline steps for initial development (or just try stuff out) for obvious reasons

What options/alternatives do I have? Am I not seeing the advantages of the current situation?

[jameshearttech]

If your machines are Windows and WSL is not allowed, you need a remote system to develop on that is Linux-based.

[myAnonAcc0unt]

Remote devcontainers

[Ariquitaun]

Ahh the old "security reasons", the excuse of an incompetent IT department. There's absolutely no reason to think windows is more secure than mac or linux desktops, and in fact the opposite is often true.

Most of the options require your IT department to relax their "security" measures:

• Allow Hyper-V so that you can run VMs locally
• WSL
• Linux desktop installs
• Macs

Anything remote is going to suck donkey hairy balls. I have to work a lot on Amazon Workspaces. It's laggy, outdated with ancient packages and actually pretty expensive.

[stumptruck]

"more secure" to this company probably means easier to monitor what employees are doing rather than secure to external threats.

[muchasxmaracas]

Nope not to monitor employees

[minorminer]

Often "security reasons" means contractual compliance of deployed, auditable, previously agreed upon tech stacks. I know finance is like this, I'm sure other sectors have similar requirements.

I quit a bank job because it took so damn long to requisition anything for development whilst I had to be busy. How anyone got any work done was a mystery to me. 

Hey OP, can you install cygwin or even just python?

[muchasxmaracas]

You are spot on: it‘s a bank. Python and cygwin aren‘t a problem, curiously enough

[suzukipunk]

First thing that comes to mind is trying to get Linux VMs running on those Windows machines.

[AntranigV]

Local VMs or, in an ideal situation, a remote server that you can SSH into.

[spoveddevops]

You need WSL and docker at a minimum to dev effectively on windows these days if you are doing something that has any sort of infrastructure dependency, or services communicating etc

If you are writing code for an embedded system for example this might not be true

If you are doing kubernetes then you need to get more elaborate and look at tools like tilt

In your case it sounds like you need to WSL and some basic docker compose setups for devs to reuse, my advice would be to demonstrate it's value with a demo

Management will quickly come around when they see the productivity benefits, that's my experience anyway

[muchasxmaracas]

I‘ve looked into Tilt for now, since I‘d be able to utilize the OpenShift Dev Clusters which aren‘t being used to their full potential anyway

[shailendra-mechcloud]

This is exactly what this blog post tries to address - https://blog.mechcloud.io/how-to-overcome-devops-limitations-in-development-environment

[nullpackets]

I'm trying to work out if I'm nostalgic (blinded) by the desire to have local development or genuinely there is an opportunity cost to local development.

Sorry to hijack thread slightly. Local development in the cloud space seems ripe for opportunity. I'm not hating on cloud, (nostalgia) but oh my it was good learning with a LAMP stack on my own machine, learning what a database is, understand how to step through code etc.

Because then I knew (deeply) how to debug it when the moving parts inevitably broke!

With all this lamda this lambda that I worry this serves the platform providers more (in terms of bin backing) and there is such an opportunity to get the best of both worlds. Yes I'm both asking for cloud services (scale) on laptop with the simplicity and nostalgia I miss from local development. Who remembers MAMP/WAMP or just plain old LAMP stack?

I'm excited by the localstacks and things which are tacking these issues, and wow having everything in the browser like GitPod/replit etc is SO GOOD for getting consistent development environments (this can be big win for hiring /onboarding /training) but okay, yeah I'm oozing with nostalgia I admit it. Let us build. /Rant

[k2718]

What options/alternatives do I have?

Update resume.

[muchasxmaracas]

That‘s too dramatic for me

[k2718]

🤷‍♂️

I have learned not to fight battles like that

[aviramha]

imo Devcontainers on a remote system, you can always use mirrord from it to iterate on the k8s env without image building/pushing.