[bhuga]

> 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.

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.

[codethief]

Maybe I'm missing something here but couldn't you just track the whole VM setup (dependencies, dev tools, telemetry and everything) in your monorepo? That is, the VM config would get pulled from master just like everything else, and then the developer would use something like nixos-shell[0] to quickly fire up a VM based on that config that they pulled.

[0]: https://github.com/Mic92/nixos-shell (not to be confused with nix-shell)

[bhuga]

Yes, but this still "freezes" the VM when the user creates it, and I've got no tools to force the software running in it to be updated. It's important that boxes can be updated, not just reliably created.

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.