That pricing is a ~70% markup over standard Azure rates.
Companies typically buy laptops with an assumed 3 year lifespan; so, let's assume a high-end $3000 laptop, that would be ~$83/month. Of course, you need a computer to access Github Codespaces, so this isn't saving all of that money. Maybe companies can cut some costs by buying cheaper laptops?
Or if you want a more apples-to-apples; a Lenovo ThinkStation P620 runs ~$2800 for 32 threads and 64gb memory. DIY would also land somewhere around that $3K mark; a Threadripper 2950x (32 thread) is $1100; 64gb of memory is around $250.
This, of course, is the most expensive option they have; the more standard option would be 4/8; for which you would pay ~$85/mo (all the time, normal work hours), for the privilege of a machine that's far less powerful than any laptop any of our developers have. For god's sake, my M1 MacBook Air is an 8/16, with four of those cores far more powerful than any three year old Xeon Azure has running. And it was like $1400.
I understand maintaining dev machines isn't the easiest thing in the world. I have never once worked anywhere where it was such a problem that the company would justify tens of thousands of dollars in spend. Because it kind of is one-or-the-other; time invested in making Github Codespaces work for your company is time not invested in maintaining local dev environments. And Github's ideal end-state is companies totally rely on Codespaces, so the local dev environments languish.
Even with Codespace your company will still have to buy you a laptop, to run corporate VPN, security/virus software, background screen recording, and zoom/video calls. All of this will still need powerful reliable business grade laptop.
The cost difference between laptop meant for remote development vs regular dev laptop is less than $1k. ($300 for CPU upgrade, $200 for RAM, $200 for SSD upgrade)?
:sigh: this is to close to home. Nothing like malfunctioning virus software + background screen recording to eat all your local machine ram and cpu cycles.
I think a lot of these things are less important by the day though. Are VPNs or advanced security software even necessary if everything is in Notion/Google Docs and something like Codespaces is being used?
End-device security is always important; there would be nothing to stop the compromise and lift of, for example, cookies stored in the browser, or a keylogger to grab passwords.
I don’t think they’re trying to save on hardware costs here. This is to prevent any kind of friction and wasted time when switching between branches/environment.
If your dev costs you $100/h, you only have to save them +/- 5 hours of faffing around with branches/dependencies every month to make it worth it (assuming a 8 hour workday).
>I understand maintaining dev machines isn't the easiest thing in the world. I have never once worked anywhere where it was such a problem that the company would justify tens of thousands of dollars in spend.
Look, this is yet another product targeting naive VC funded startups. Milking the cows until they bleed.
It's not worth it right now. The economies of scale could add up to make it break even, if not be cheaper.
Big could, of course. But considering it takes new devs at my company ~3 business days to get up and running (and we're a React shop), it could be worthwhile.
Companies typically buy laptops with an assumed 3 year lifespan; so, let's assume a high-end $3000 laptop, that would be ~$83/month. Of course, you need a computer to access Github Codespaces, so this isn't saving all of that money. Maybe companies can cut some costs by buying cheaper laptops?
Or if you want a more apples-to-apples; a Lenovo ThinkStation P620 runs ~$2800 for 32 threads and 64gb memory. DIY would also land somewhere around that $3K mark; a Threadripper 2950x (32 thread) is $1100; 64gb of memory is around $250.
This, of course, is the most expensive option they have; the more standard option would be 4/8; for which you would pay ~$85/mo (all the time, normal work hours), for the privilege of a machine that's far less powerful than any laptop any of our developers have. For god's sake, my M1 MacBook Air is an 8/16, with four of those cores far more powerful than any three year old Xeon Azure has running. And it was like $1400.
I understand maintaining dev machines isn't the easiest thing in the world. I have never once worked anywhere where it was such a problem that the company would justify tens of thousands of dollars in spend. Because it kind of is one-or-the-other; time invested in making Github Codespaces work for your company is time not invested in maintaining local dev environments. And Github's ideal end-state is companies totally rely on Codespaces, so the local dev environments languish.
Its not worth it.