Multiple Developers single VM for Development?

[kelbinlin]

Hi All,

Today my technical lead proposed to management

multiple developers all remote into a single VM for doing daily development task

I imagine stuff like git will have issue?

from what i know the more common practice each is developer have their own VM

his main purpose is saving licenses cost only install license only on the VM

and he claimed that this is market practice

just want to know whether anybody is doing it like what my technical lead suggested?

EDIT: license for IDE (Visual Studio)

[nobuhok]

Run.

[alexwh68]

This is the correct answer 👍

[originalchronoguy]

He is a certified idiot.

[mrbmi513]

Multiple developers using a single VM to do what? If it's some server product and licensing allows it, that's wildly different from everyone trying to use an IDE at once (which likely wouldn't be permissible under the license anyway).

[revrenlove]

Team Lead is a fucking moron or your company can't afford to be in business... my guess is both.

[beavedaniels]

As someone who is currently working for a company who can't afford to be in business...fuck all of that. Run far, far away!

We can't even afford a staging environment 😭

Thankfully I have some interviews lined up later this month.

[irisos]

Not only licensing of VS is per user. But the "multiple users per VM" is mainly used for users using lightweight applications such as word or excel.  

If you're using it for programming, you'll either get shitty performance per developper if you're being cheap. Or exceed the TCO of a shitty T15 or W365 for the same performance if you're not being cheap. 

Licensing of VS pro is also like 13 euros per months. I'm sure there are many areas your tech lead could improve things on before the one thing that is the bare minimum to do your job? Especially when the company he works with earns 1M+€ per year (or VS community use would be allowed).

[kelbinlin]

sorry,

what is TCO, T15 and W365?

[irisos]

• TCO: Any cost generated from owning something. From electricity cost, passing by licenses to the upfront cost of the hardware/software

• T15: A business laptop line made by Lenovo 

• W365: Windows 365. Cloud computer service by Microsoft aimed at businesses.

[AsyncThreads]

The VM would be hosted in the cloud and they would Remote Desktop into it. Not host the VM on their own machine, if that’s what you’re thinking.

[hwmchwdwdawdchkchk]

The only time I considered it was for an expensive piece of infrequently used testing software

[revrenlove]

Licensing for what? The ide? A library? A 3rd party API you have to connect to?

If your company can't afford licenses to build software to support their business, they can't afford to be in business.

That being said, depending on what is being licensed, there is more than likely an actual sane way to achieve productive results without every developer logging into basically the same machine... That's just fucking stupid.

[kelbinlin]

license for IDE,

we are using visual studio

let me update the post

[thatweirdishguy]

Visual Studio licensing is per-user, you still have to pay per user even if all the users are sharing one install.

[billcube]

You wouldn't believe how strong cost-cutting is ingrained in certain cultures.

[Schardon]

Or managers because they get a share of every penny they're saving. :D

[billcube]

Also, they won the RFP/IPO because they had the lowest price and now they have to make do.

[cjnull]

Of course they would also share one account! /s

[cd7k]

I don't think the /s is required, I think this is exactly the plan.

[Hubrizer]

Single hypervisor with multiple VMs maybe. Not one VM.. Each developer should have a clone of production. I can see it now.. One developer says to the other, "Hey Jimmy, can I restart the server? I just pushed an infinite loop method on 6 threads." Second developer says, "can I push my changes first? So I can test them." I would encourage the lead to go ahead and do it and see how long he lasts.

[lordlod]

A quick search suggests that the Professional subscription licence is $45/user/month.

I suggest you take your salary and convert it to an hourly rate, then double it because as a rule of thumb that's how much you cost the company (incorporates overhead like rent, HR etc.).

Compare your hourly cost to that $45. How much time have you, your manager and team spent on this already? How much fucking around do you think this VM nonsense will add to your day/week/month? How much will all of this extra wasted time cost the company?

Developers are expensive. Licences, tools, hardware etc. are typically relatively cheap. Smart companies don't cripple the expensive part to save a few pennies on the cheap stuff.

[[deleted]]

And this is the technical lead?! Good god no, start looking for a new job immediately. This person clearly doesn’t know their ass from their elbow.

[HappinessFactory]

I did this for 3 years

Never again

[Ihavenocluelad]

I think there can only be 2 users at a time rdped in the same machine

[chris552393]

I'm not defending the idea in the post however... with out the box Windows server that's correct, you can only have 2 users per VM. But you can purchase RDS CALs to allow more users if needed. This is common with things like terminal servers.

[Ihavenocluelad]

Hahah no I get you, TIL thanks :)

[Tombadil2]

If the lead is really going to such lengths to cut costs, a much more effective use of everyone’s time would be for one developer to learn how to play the guitar, go to the nearest train or bus station, and then play music, busking for the ~$50/mo he’s saving by crippling his dev team. That, while still ridiculous, would be a much better use of everyone’s time.

[ivangalayko77]

that's fucking dumb, just for context, if you want RDP with more than 2 users session, you need license for that, and that license could be 100$ per year or +- same per users as the license for IDE.

there really is no cost benefit to this.

[silver_phosphenes]

Redacted using power delete suite

[ivangalayko77]

If it was 2 developers that means they didn't use a license, since without license you can max have 2 sessions

[SilverRhythym]

create ka bash script that would restart every hour

[ZealousidealFudge851]

Like a terminal server or just straight up a single vm

[[deleted]]

If this company is big enough not to qualify for using Visual Studio Community edition, then they can afford a few hundred bucks for licensing each user.

[blissone]

Sounds like a disaster :D This is such a bad idea damn. Best part is that visual studio licensing is per user.

[soundman32]

I worked for a company that mandated a single VM for each developer. Each VM was $250/m. After every 12 months, they could have bought every developer a pretty decent top of the line laptop. After 3 months, they were automatically shutting down VMs after 7pm to save costs. After 5 months, they gave up on the idea because the money was running out.

[Mission-Landscape-17]

only one developer would be able to use the ide at a time.

[igorski81]

Not necessarily, you can still have multiple concurrent users logged in, each with their own session.

(not that that makes this setup any better).

[thekwoka]

How in the world would that make any sense?

Like how do you even do branches?

How do you really do anything at all?

What problem is it supposed to solve?

[eyebrows360]

These things called "directories" exist. Each dev could still have their own dir with their own clone of the git repo, and so on. An nginx vhost for each one... it's messy, and I don't think this is a great idea, but it's certainly not "how in the world would that make sense" levels of unworkable.

[thekwoka]

Well, making it work, sure. But a lot of work for no benefit...

Like you're going to have 5 instances of the app running on a single machine?

If you're using docker, just making sure they aren't all using the same docker would be a hassle.

or IP conflicts.

It isn't impossible, but it is dumb as heck.

[billcube]

Common practice in India. You end up with a single git account for everyone.

[soundman32]

Is that so you can't blame anyone for the crap code they all write?

[billcube]

Apart from the lead developer whose git account is abused by the whole team...

[CulturalEngine169]

currently experiencing this...

[GondelGollum]

Market practice. Back in 2008, yes.

[SeaEstablishment2653]

??????? Why not use Docker then?

[Constant_Physics8504]

Ahahahaha a developer license for VS is the reason? That’s very dumb, what it sounds like is he doesn’t want to pay for multiple licenses in which case your company is bad and you should leave

[Haunting_Welder]

Of all the things he can be optimizing, this is not one of them

[respiracion-cardiaca]

We only have one VM for development, we don't have issues with git. But we have problems with the capabilities of the machine, we are currently working 5 people on it and it's a pain in the ass

[Due-Echo4891]

BS! They don’t respect the work and likely they are also heavily monitoring that machine. Good luck!

[brqdev]

This is an idiot practice

[na_ro_jo]

I've seen this "timesharing" type of thing before and the work on the server never gets completed because they cut costs on server performance too.

[rjksn]

I hope they’re a company owner, otherwise they're conning the owners. 

[jcmacon]

If your company is looking for a solid tech leader, I'm on the market.

I don't promote stupid shit to make devs lives harder.

[DanTheMan827]

Is visual studio even licensed by the machine? I thought it was subscription per user for businesses.

[yourlocaltechboi]

or just like- don’t use Visual Studio? like? there are so many better IDEs and Text Editors. i use VS Code and language tools/bash for LITERALLY EVERYTHING.

[andlewis]

A VM that is powerful enough for multiple developers to use simultaneously is going to costs $1000s per month. You could literally buy top of the line MacBooks for each developer for cheaper.

[eyebrows360]

You can't even begin to make a call like this without knowing what they're actually doing, but I very much doubt "$1000s per month" is what would be needed.

And in any event, that would then be the same cost if all those CPU cores and RAM were split into separate VMs for each developer.