[fallenhitokiri]

To give an additional data point for people who are interested how a setup like this performs for daily use:

I am currently running Parallels Tech Preview on the MacBook Air M1 and primarily use PyCharm (remote interpreter and deployment to the VM). The whole thing works better than expected considering it’s still a preview release. Battery lasts around 12 hours, sometimes an hour or so more depending on what else I run.

I am currently working on a Django app. When saving while the debug server is running I can command tab to my REST client and make an API request and the change was already deployed and the server restarted. Despite dealing with a VM the whole thing is just fast.

[tbrock]

If you don’t absolutely need a local VM I’ve found it much nicer to have a beefy ec2 instance be the Linux vm that you connect to in order to work in Linux on x86.

Recently I’ve been doing this with VSCode which has a remote dev mode that works amazingly well. Before that I was just using ssh and tmux/screen which, as we know, also works and has worked for decades.

[aidos]

In our basic testing on M1 performance this week we’ve found that an arm vm on the M1 runs about 2x as fast as a c6g.2xlarge graviton2 instance. So you’re probably looking at about $0.50 / hr to compete with the Mac.

[fallenhitokiri]

I am curious what you find „much nicer“ using an EC2 instance than a local VM.

When running remote VMs I usually run them on my ESXi box in the basement and VPN back home when traveling. This is especially nice when a project needs more resources than whatever device I’m working on has to offer. But beside this very specific use case I haven’t personally found any advantage of this setup.