Stripe's Monorepo Developer Environment

https://blog.nelhage.com/post/stripe-dev-environment/

by edran • 2 years ago

393 240 2 years ago

blog.nelhage.com

domenkozar• 2 years ago

We've been building https://devenv.sh for that reason, I expect more companies to go back to local development once they see DX has improved locally.

evnix• 2 years ago

How is this better or different from tools like dev which use docker

drakerossman• 2 years ago

It (obviously) leverages Nix, which in turn means the environment is declarative and fully reproducible (not "reproducible" as in docker). Now, you can use just Nix's devShells, but with devenv you have a middleground between just Nix package manager and a full fledged NixOS module system. Basically, write out one line of code - and you've got your Postgres, another one - full linter set up for whatever language you're using, etc.

stavros2• 2 years ago

Nix is the right tool for this, developing a tool to make Nix's UX easier is a great idea. Thanks for this!

dirtbag__dad2• 2 years ago

What about dev containers?

eadmund• 2 years ago

Nix is the right tool for this

Or Guix, which has the advantage of a more pleasant language.

pxc4• 2 years ago

My small team uses devenv for all our development environments and we really like it. Local DX is really important to me and to our team, which is a big part of why we've chosen Nix and devenv.

As we've started to use it more extensively, we've also found that we want to add some enhancements, work out some bugs, and experiment with our own customizations out-of-tree, etc. I'm happy to report here on HN that devenv is well-documented and easy to extend for Nix users who have some experience with Nix module systems, and that Domen is really responsive to PRs. :)

reillys4• 2 years ago

I chatted to Nelson when I was designing brisk (https://github.com/brisktest/brisk) and his insight informed the development of it.

Among other things, Brisk allows you to run tests for your local code changes in the cloud (basically the pay mini test piece but for any test runner)

We also have a sync step much like the one described here and allow users to run one off commands (linters, tsc etc)

IshKebab3• 2 years ago

Can't you achieve all that just using a build system with reliable remote builds & caching e.g. Bazel, Buck, Please, etc?

That also avoids hacky sync scripts.

reillys4• 2 years ago

No you can’t.

They don’t work from your local development env and also work in your CI env.

Mostly Brisk was designed to run your complete test suite on every codes save (ie local save) but it also works great from your CI.

We can run entire test suites in seconds which is performance you don’t get with those systems you named (which are generally for building/compiling)

riffraff• 2 years ago

Brisk allows you to run tests for your local code changes in the cloud

how does this work for interactive debugging?

I was going to ask the same about the system in TFA but I might as well ask you :)

KolmogorovComp• 2 years ago

In addition, Stripe’s monorepo was (to our knowledge) the largest Ruby codebase in existence

Bigger than shoppify's?

Macha• 2 years ago

So from a gut feeling that sounds right, finance is a pretty complicated domain with a lot of per vendor interactions, and Shopify outsources their payment stuff to Stripe.

Also on a headcount level, Google tells me Shopify has 3,500 employees to Stripe's 9,500. Obviously neither company is compromised entirely of engineers, so this is a ballpark estimate.

GitHub feels like the real case where there might be a larger codebase. It's in the middle for employees (6,500), but it's existed longer than Stripe (though not as much longer as my gut feeling told me, interestingly)

wmoxam• 2 years ago

Shopify outsources their payment stuff to Stripe

I thought they used active_merchant

spacemonkey922• 2 years ago

I also wonder how they handle merge requests in a monorepo, especially when it comes to the code review process.

azthecx• 2 years ago

Typically you have owner files or similar in the subprojects that are read by automation tooling and humans alike

popinman322• 2 years ago

It's possible to get stuck in merge hell where all your reviewers ok the PR but someone merged a conflict 2 seconds ago, or you've got a reviewer in Singapore while you're in SF and conflicts appeared overnight.

In general it was pretty rare, in my experience. The code bases were pretty well modularized.

shepwalker2• 2 years ago

Hi! I work at Stripe on this. What're you curious about?

froydnj3• 2 years ago

The most recent publicly available numbers (that I know of, maybe there's a talk available somewhere that's more recent) are from https://stripe.com/blog/sorbet-stripes-type-checker-for-ruby

currently amounting to over 15 million lines of code spread across 150,000 files

The monorepo has only gotten bigger over the last two years (source: I work at Stripe).

froydnj3• 2 years ago

I should also note that number is Ruby files only.

rvz• 2 years ago

This isn't recommended practice really and there is nothing about this which justifies having to maintain huge code bases in a single folder or multiple folders in one larger one.

Won't be surprised to see that many would probably need a safari map or README documentation in every single folder to navigate a repository as large as stripes.

Sounds like an emergence of a new bad practice if you are having to praise how large your code base is.

pavlov• 2 years ago

Meta also has a massive monorepo accessed primarily through cloud devservers.

When several of the world’s most successful software companies use this approach, it’s hard to argue that it’s inherently bad. Of course it’s sensible to discuss what lessons apply to smaller companies who don’t have the luxury of dedicated tooling teams supporting the monorepo and dev environment.

n_ary• 2 years ago

Just because some successful companies use some approach doesn't make it the best practice. I have seen firsthand nuisance of monorepo, which took almost 15minutes to correctly switch branches on intel machines(and decently spiked the CPU by causing windows defender to panic). It has decent benefit of easy code sharing, but build and test are soul sucking experiences and if someone decides to run some updated formatter and linter rule accidentally, the whole MR becomes a nightmare to correctly review(once had a 2k+ changes and had to request to rollback and then only commit what they actually wanted to change).

mootoday2• 2 years ago

Meta also uses React and we know what mess that introduced to the world...

ABS• 2 years ago

very much recommended practice by many with, of course, caveats and situations where perfect is the enemy of good, etc, etc

e.g. https://trunkbaseddevelopment.com/monorepos/

lijok• 2 years ago

Won't be surprised to see that many would probably need a safari map or README documentation in every single folder to navigate a repository as large as stripes.

No different to having thousands of smaller repos instead.

I personally dislike monorepos, for very niche, in-the-weeds operational reasons (as an infra person), but their ergonomics for DX cannot be understated.

__jonas• 2 years ago

The 'ergonomics for DX' benefit is that you can share code across projects without having to go down the path of creating a package / library pushed to some internal registry and pulled by each project right?

Or are there any other aspects to the monorepo architecture that make it beneficial for large companies like that?

Just curious, I've never worked in such an environment myself.

chrisweekly• 2 years ago

understated -> overstated

papruapap• 2 years ago

imo monorepos are great, but the tooling is not there, especially the open-sourced ones. Most companies using monorepos have their own tailored tools for it.

bastawhiz6• 2 years ago

Won't be surprised to see that many would probably need a safari map or README documentation in every single folder

Is...documentation a bad thing?

Aeolun2• 2 years ago

They decided to keep the code on the local machine, but the language server on the remote one. That seems like a recipe for inconsistency. You only get relevant results from your language server once your code has synced.

Hackbraten• 2 years ago

The article mentions that the LSP itself already has baked-in support to enable editors to send chunks of unsaved edits to the language server (LS) as they happen.

What Stripe’s configuration introduced is that they used a remote LS instead of the default local LS. Regardless, VS Code already defers LSP communication until it feels idle, and developers are used to that. So I wouldn’t expect a remote LS to significantly impact the level of inconsistency that developers already accept when using a local LS.

Aeolun2• 2 years ago

Huh, I missed that first part. That’s a decent way to go about it.

bastawhiz6• 2 years ago

I was at Stripe until 2022 and inconsistency with the language server was never an issue

aidos10• 2 years ago

Due to the work that this team put in though, right?

The choice to run dev environment far away from the files puts you in the position of needing to engineer your way past the inconsistency.

paxys• 2 years ago

The code syncs on every keystroke. Consistency isn't an issue unless you are having connection issues. And if you are then pretty much all development is broken anyways.

srvaroa2• 2 years ago

"This scale – the scale of devprod, and in turn the scale of the overall organization, such that it could afford 10 FTEs on tooling – was a major factor in our choices"

Is basically the summary for most mono/multi repo discussions, and a bunch of other related ones.

mhh__• 2 years ago

Not sure.

I think a lot of this is just type of thing comes because with a monorepo you can actually see the problems to solve whereas you can easily end up with the same N engineers firefighting the same problems K times across all your polyrepos.

bluGill2• 2 years ago

You have different problems with both. Some problems are hidden in one, but there is no one best answer. (unless your project is small/trivial - which is what a lot of them are)

klodolph• 2 years ago

Multirepo also comes with cost overhead. I think people talk about it somewhat less. I’ve worked at multirepo and monorepo places, both, before. My current company has a multirepo setup and it sure seems like it comes with plenty of tooling to fetch dependencies. That tooling has to be supported by FTEs.

hibikir2• 2 years ago

Internally, they definitely do. I worked at Stripe's monorepo many years ago, and I am working at a larger company with massive amounts of repos. The difference in pain has little to do with mono v multi, but with the capabilities of your tooling team.

If there's anything I'd say to low-level execs, the kind that end up with a few hundred developers under them, it's that mis-sizing the tooling team, in one way or the other, comes with total productivity penalties that will appear invisible, but will make everything expensive. Understanding how much of a developer's day is toil is very important, but few really try to figure that out.

aylmao2• 2 years ago

+1. I'd go as far to say that multi-repo probably needs as much, if not more effort to properly keep functioning, but all that effort is better "hidden" so people assume monorepos are more work.

With a monorepo, it's common to have a team focused on tooling and maintaining the monorepo. The structure of the codebase lends itself to that

With a multirepo codebase, it's usually up tu different teams to do the work associated with "multirepo issues"— orchestrate releases, handle dependencies, dev environment setup, etc. So all that effort just kinda gets "tucked away" as overhead that each team assumes, and isn't quite as visible

bluGill2• 2 years ago

It doesn't matter if you have a mono-rep or multi-repo, you will need engineers on tooling to make it work if your project is large. There are pros and cons to both multi-repo and mono-repo with no one right answer (despite what some will tell you). They are different pros and cons, but which is best depends on your particular context.

srvaroa2• 2 years ago

Yeah that was my point. In the end both approaches can be fine (depends on your context). The real difference is that whatever choice you take, it will need the right investment in tooling and support.

bool3max• 2 years ago

Off-topic but the font on this blog is stunning - after some digging it seems to be "Vollkorn".

delhanty• 2 years ago

Some caveats: It’s been nearly five years, and I have no doubt that I have misremembered some of the specific details, even though I’m confident in the overall picture. I’m also certain that Stripe has continued evolving and I make no claim this document represents the developer experience at Stripe as of today.

Are there any more recently ex-Stripe folks here willing and able to comment on how Stripe's developer environment might have evolved since the OP left in 2019?

artyom• 2 years ago

Not ex-Stripe but in "close relationship" with them since its inception and there's a clear mark in my calendar circa end of 2018 when their decisions and output started to become... weird, or ill-designed.

I don't think it has to do with the dev environment itself, but I'd blame such thing for allowing to deliver "too fast" without thinking twice. Combine that with new blood in management and that's an accident waiting to happen *

They're the best in business still, but far from the well-designed easy-to-use API-first developer-friendly initial offering.

* Pure speculation based on very evident patterns

rattray• 2 years ago

Ex-Stripe ('17-'20) here. Agree.

Though I am under the impression that things have gotten more sensical internally over the last year or so.

Note also that the devprod team has largely been shielded from the craziness, and may still be making good decisions (but I don't know what they are in this realm personally).

nkohari2• 2 years ago

I spent 4.5 years at Stripe, and left in March.

The biggest difference not mentioned is the article is that code is no longer kept on developer machines. The sync process described in the article was well-designed, but also was a fairly constant source of headaches. (For example, sometimes the file watcher would miss an update and the code on your remote machine would be broken in strange ways, and you'd have to recognize that it was a sync issue instead of an actual problem with your code.) As a result, the old devbox system was superseded by "remote devboxes", which also host the code. Engineers use VSCode remote development via SSH. It works shockingly well for a codebase the size of Stripe's.

There are actually several different monorepos at Stripe, which is a constant source of frustration. There have been lots of efforts to try to unify the codebase into a single git repo, but it was difficult for a lot of reasons, not the least of which was the "main" monorepo was already testing the limits of the solution used for git hosting.

Overall, maintaining good developer productivity is an extremely challenging problem. This is especially true for a company like Stripe, which is both too large to operate as a "small" company and too small to operate as a "big" company. Even with a well-funded team of lots of super talented people putting forth their best efforts, it's tough to keep all of the wheels fully greased.

jcmfernandes2• 2 years ago

Thanks for this. Can you share the experience of those who don't use VS Code?

cynicalpeace2• 2 years ago

Glad to see that they moved to code living with the execution environment. The code living separate from the execution environment seemed like too much overhead and complexity for not enough benefit.

Especially given VSCode, or Cursor ;), work so well via ssh.

To the engineers that don't want to use those IDE's it might suck temporarily, but that's it.

chaosphere2112• 2 years ago

I was only there in 2022, but at that point there were in fact three or more monorepos (forked roughly based on toolchain - go and scala in one, primarily Ruby in the one detailed here, and there was one for the client stripe api libs that was JS only. There may have been more.

bhuga8• 2 years ago

Some important differences from 2019:

* Code is off of laptops and lives entirely on the dev server in many (but not all) cases. This has opened up a lot of use cases where devs can have multiple branches in flight at once.

* Big investments into bazel.

* Heavier investment into editor experiences. We find most developers are not as idiosyncratic in their editor choices as is commonly believed, and most want a pre-configured setup where jump-to-def and such all "just work".

cynicalpeace2• 2 years ago

I'm glad to see that first bullet point. The code living separate from the execution environment seemed like too much overhead and complexity for not enough benefit.

eikenberry• 2 years ago

That last point has long been a red flag when interviewing. A developer who doesn't care about their tooling also tends to not care about the quality of their work.

pjmlp• 2 years ago

Yet another replay of timesharing development experiences, I guess we need a couple of generations more to count how many times does a pendulum swing back and forth during a developer's lifetime.

jdtig2• 2 years ago

Does Stripe use RoR?

The author mentions the codebase was Ruby, but I didn't see if they talked about Rails.

bastawhiz6• 2 years ago

It is Ruby but not rails

jdtig2• 2 years ago

Thanks. I wonder what the experience is like working on a very large codebase with or without a framework. E.g. Stripe vs Shopify.

Or if the framework is barely noticeable at that scale and doesn't really matter anymore. That's the impression I get for Instagram (which was built with Django).

jcmfernandes2• 2 years ago

Do they use zeitwerk?

anonzzzies• 2 years ago

We use similar practices in our 3.5 person team; we work via code-server and Aider with our own tooling on VPSs and this gets synced to execution VPSs which run dev versions, a lot of sentry logging and tests (mostly playwright these days). There is also a vps which does builds all day and logs to Sentry too. We can almost instantly get on our own test versions and see what we did, and, over the space of some seconds to minutes we see test and build data coming in. It works incredibly well for many years already. Onboarding people is easy and no one ever has 'it doesn't build on my system' as that's not something we do (you can of course, all scripts are there but why waste the time?).

I grew up with mainframes, minis and unix batch andor multiuser machines; for me this is the best way for business applications. I didn't particularly like the move to local all that much.

aidos10• 2 years ago

Maybe a silly question, but why all this engineering effort when you could host the dev environment locally?

By running a Linux VM on your local machine you get a consistent environment that you can ssh to, remove the latency issues but you remove all the complexity of syncing that they’ve created.

That’s a setup that’s worked well for me for 15 years but maybe I’m missing some other benefit?

yeswecatan• 2 years ago

I came to ask the same thing. We use docker-compose to describe all our services which works fine.

JasonSage7• 2 years ago

This does not scale to a large number of services with a certain amount of RAM/processing per service.

n0us• 2 years ago

You're limited by the resources available to you on your local laptop and when you close that laptop the dev environment stops running. Remote dev environments are more costly and complicated to maintain but they can be shared, can scale vertically (or horizontally) on demand, can persist when you exit them, and managing access to various internal services from dev environments can in some cases be simpler.

It also centralizes dev environment management to the platform team that owns them and provides them as a service which cuts down on support tickets related to broken dev environments. There are certainly some trade offs though and for most companies a local VM or docker compose file will be a better choice.

giido• 2 years ago

Also tends to security advantages to mitigate/manage dev risks. Typically hosts will have security tooling installed (AV, EDR, etc) that may not be installed on local VMs, hosts are ephemeral so quickly created and destroyed, network restrictions, etc.

underdeserver3• 2 years ago

Most local laptops are much stronger than is needed to run the entire stack of your average startup with no resource issues.

And the dev environment stops running when you close the laptop, but you also don't need it since you're not developing.

Not saying it can work for absolutely all cases but it's definitely good enough for a lot of cases.

crabbone6• 2 years ago

Not even once did I want to share my dev. environment, nor did anyone want to share mine. We are talking about 25-odd years of being a developer.

Never in my life did I want to scale my dev. environment vertically or horizontally or in any other direction. Unless you work on a calculator, I don't know why would you need that.

I have no problems with my environment stopping when I close my laptop. Why is this a problem for anyone?

For overwhelming majority of programming projects out there they fit on a programmer's laptop just fine. The rare exceptions are the projects which require very specialized equipment not available to the developers. In any case, a simulator would be usually a preferable way to dealing with this, and the actual equipment would be only accessed for testing, not for development. Definitely not as a routine development process.

Never in my life did I want development process to be centralized. All developers have different habits, tastes and preferences. Last thing I want is to have centralized management of all environments which would create unwanted uniformity. I've been only once in a company that tried to institute a centrally-managed development environment in the way you describe, and I just couldn't cope with it. I quit after few month of misery. The most upsetting aspect about these efforts is stupidity. These efforts solve no problems, but add a lot of pain that is felt continuously, all the time you have to do anything work-related.

bhuga8• 2 years ago

I work on this at Stripe. There's a lot of reasons:

* Local dev has laptop-based state that is hard to keep in sync for everyone. Broken laptops are _really hard_ to debug as opposed to cloud servers I can deploy dev management software to. I can safely say the oldest version of software that's in my cloud; the laptops skew across literally years of versions of dev tools despite a talented corpeng team managing them.

* Our cloud servers have a lot more horsepower than a laptop, which is important if a dev's current task involves multiple services.

* With a server, I can get detailed telemetry out of how devs work and what they actually wait on that help me understand what to work on next; I have to have pretty invasive spyware on laptops to do the same.

* Servers in our QA environment can interact with QA services in a way that is hard for a laptop to do. Some of these are "real services", others are incredibly important to dev itself, such as bazel caches.

There's other things; this is an abbreviated list.

If a linux VM works for you, keep working! But we have not been able to scale a thousands-of-devs experience on laptops.

aidos10• 2 years ago

I want to double check we’re talking about the same thing here. I’m referring to running everything inside a single VM that you would have total access to. It could have telemetry, you’d know versions etc. I wonder if there’s some confusion around what I’m suggesting given your points above.

I’m sure there are a bunch of things that make it the right choice for Stripe. Obviously if you just have too many things to run at a time and a dev laptop can’t handle it then it’s a dealbreaker. What’s the size of the cloud instances you have to run on?

hibikir2• 2 years ago

To provide historical context, 10 years ago there was a local dev infrastructure, but it was already so creaky as to be unreliable. Just getting the ruby dependencies updated was a problem. The local dev was also already cheating: All the asynchronous work that was triggered via RabbitMQ/Kafka was getting hacked together, because trying to run everything that Infra/Queues did locally would have been very wasteful. So magic occurred in the calls to the message queue that instead triggered the crucial ruby code that would be hit in the end.

So if this was a problem back then, when the company had less than 1000 employees, I can't even imagine how hard would it be to get local dev working now

underdeserver3• 2 years ago

The way these problems are stated mighy make it seem like they're unsolvable without a lot of effort. I just want to point out that I've worked at places that do use a local, supported environment, and it works well.

Not saying it's the wrong choice for you, but it's a choice, not a natural conclusion.

crabbone6• 2 years ago

Working in a configuration where your development environment isn't on your computer is always a huge downgrade. Work with VM? -- sooner or later you'll have problems with forwarding your keyboard input to the VM. Work with containers? -- no good way to save state, no good way to guarantee all containers are in sync etc. God forbid any sort of Web browser-based solution. The number of times I accidentally closed the tab or did something else unintentionally because of key mapping that's impossible to modify...

However, in some situations you must endure the pain of doing this. For example, regulatory reasons. Some organizations will not allow you to access their data anywhere but on some cloud VM they give you very botched and very limited control over. While, technically, these are usually easy to side-step, you are legally required to not move the data outside of the boundaries defined for you by the IT. And so you are stuck in this miserable situation, trying to engineer some semblance of a decent utility set in a hostile environment.

Another example is when the infrastructure of your project is too vast to be meaningfully reduced to your laptop, and a lot of your work is exploratory in nature. I.e. instead of typical write-compile-upload-test you are mostly modifying stuff on the system you are working on to see how it responds. This is kind of how my day-to-day goes: someone reported they fail to install or use one of the utilities we provide in a particular AWS region with some specific network settings etc. They'd give me a tunnel to the affected cluster, and I'd have some hours to spend there investigating the problem and looking for possible immediate and long-term solutions. So, you are essentially working in a tech-support role, but you also have to write code, debug it, sometimes compile it etc.

aidos10• 2 years ago

Sounds like you’re talking about something else (more like the Citrix / virtual desktop type model - I don’t know the name).

The idea here is that you use a VM (cloud or local) to run your compute. Most people can run it in the background without explicitly connecting to it.

simonw• 2 years ago

In my opinion the single most important feature of any development environment is a reliable “reset” button.

The amount of time companies lose to broken development environments is incredible. A developer can easily lose half a day (or more) of productive time.

With cloud environments it’s much easier to offer a “just give me a brand new environment that works” button somewhere. That’s incredibly valuable.

aidos10• 2 years ago

For sure, but, a VM has that feature too. They have to run some services directly on the laptop to handle the code syncing. So if you accept a certain amount of “need to do some dev machine setup” as a cost, installing Parallels and running a script to download an iso is a pretty small surface area that allows for a full reset.

I don’t doubt that Stripe have a setup that works well for them them but I also bet they could have gone done a different path that also worked well and I suspect that other path (local VMs) is a better fit for most other smaller teams.

dheera• 2 years ago

By running a Linux VM

Or just run Linux on your local machine as the OS. I don't get the obsession with Macs as dev workstations for companies whose products run on Linux.

philwelch• 2 years ago

Especially when they don’t even deploy to ARM servers.

uncanneyvalley• 2 years ago

The year of Linux on the laptop has yet to arrive for most of us. Windows and MacOS both offer better battery life, if for no other reason (and there are usually other reasons, like suspend/wake issues, graphics driver woes, etc.)

globular-toast• 2 years ago

Agreed. It's so much simpler when people run Linux locally too. Most of our dev environment problems are from people who don't. When you run it locally you also get good at using it which, unsurprisingly, helps a lot when you have to figure out a problem with the deployed version. Learning MacOS/Windows is kinda pointless knowledge in the long run.

trevor-e• 2 years ago

From what I remember (left Stripe in late 2022) much of Stripe's codebase was/is a Ruby tangled "big ball of mud" monorepo due to lack of proper modules. Basically a lot of the core modules all imported code from each other with little layering so you couldn't deploy a lean service without pulling in almost all of the monorepo code. And due to the way imports worked it would load a ton of this code a runtime. This meant that even a simple service would have extremely high memory usage and be unsuitable for a local dev environment where you have N of these bloated services running at the same time. There was a big refactoring effort to get "strict modules" in place to cut down on this bloat which had some promising results. I'm not an expert in this area but I believe this was the gist of it.

mleo• 2 years ago

I use syncthing to manage the synchronization of files between local laptop and remote development server. The software code base is upwards of 20 years and has dependencies on Windows for runtime. I can run unit tests locally on very fast MacBook Pro or run it much slower on Windows VM. With syncthing I can easily edit files locally or remotely and they are available locally for source control.

The worst problem is refining the ignore settings to ensure only code is synced preventing conflicts on derivative files and that some rule doesn’t overlap code file names.

nxicvyvy• 2 years ago

Try unison, it's built for this use case.

https://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/

shepherdjerred• 2 years ago

I like Unison, though I found Mutagen a bit better.

https://mutagen.io/

mootoday2• 2 years ago

I've worked with remote dev environments for many years, including some time with one of the providers of such a service.

It became clear to me that cloud-only is not the way to go, but instead a local-first, cloud-optional approach.

https://mootoday.com/blog/dev-environments-in-the-cloud-are-...

numbsafari2• 2 years ago

This is my biggest complaint with GitHub CodeSpaces.

I should be able to launch a local VM using the GitHub Desktop App just as easily as I can an Azure-hosted instance.

ParetoOptimal6• 2 years ago

But then how will they lock you into paying them monthly?

mikeocool• 2 years ago

Look into dev containers — if you set one up for your repo, you get pretty much the same experience as GitHub Codespaces, but the choice of running it locally.

truetraveller• 2 years ago

"I’ve described a lot of fairly-involved custom tooling; we needed enough engineers to build and maintain it, and enough “customer” engineers for that investment to pay off."

This is so important when deciding to re-invent the wheel. I've gotten bitten by this many times.

p-o• 2 years ago

It's always so enlightening to have articles like this one shed light on how companies at scale operate. It goes without saying that many of the problems Stripe faced with their monorepo isn't application to smaller businesses, but there are still bits and pieces that are applicable to many of us.

I've been working on an ephemeral/preview environment operator for Kubernetes(https://github.com/pier-oliviert/sequencer) and as I could agree to a lot of things OP said.

I think dev boxes is really the way to go, specially with all the components that makes an application nowadays. But the latency/synchronization issue is a hard topic and it's full of tradeoff.

A developer's laptop always ends up being a bespoke environment (yes, Nix/Docker can help with that), and so, there's always a confidence boost when you get your changes up on a standalone environment. It gives you the proof that "hey things are working like I expected them to".

draw_down• 2 years ago

Right, dev boxes do not need to do double duty as a personal computer plus development target, which allows them to more closely resemble the machine your code will actually run on. They also can be replaced easily, which can be helpful if you ever suspect something is wrong with the box itself - if the new one acts the same way, it wasn't the dev box.

I don't recall latency being a big problem in practice. In an organization like this, it's best to keep branches up to date with respect to master anyway, so the diffs from switching between branches should be small. There was a lot of work done to make all this quite performant and nice to use. The slowest part was always CI.

tmpz222• 2 years ago

I feel like we're not getting the right lessons from this. It feels like we're focusing on HOW we can do something versus pausing for a brief moment to consider if we SHOULD in the first place.

To me the root issue is the complexity of production environments has expanded to the point of impacting complexity in developer environments just to deploy or test - this is in conjunction with expanding complexity of developer environments just to develop - i.e. web pack.

For very large well resourced organizations like Stripe that actually operate at scale that complexity may very well be unavoidable. But most organizations are not Stripe. They should consider decreasing complexity instead of investing in complex tooling to wrangle it.

I'd go as far as to suggest both monorepos and dev-boxes are complex toolchains that many organizations should consider avoiding.

hamandcheese4• 2 years ago

My main gripe with the dev box approach is that a cloud instance with similar compute resources as a developers MacBook is hella expensive. Even ignoring compute, a 1TB ebs volume with equivalent performance to a MacBook will probably cost more than the MacBook every month.

axus• 2 years ago

The article didn't actually say what "Stripe's cloud environment" was, besides "outside of the production environment". I assumed the company had their own hardware but your assumption is more probable.

MetaWhirledPeas2• 2 years ago

Wouldn't this be a reasonable alternative? Asking because I don't have experience with this.

1. New shared builds update container images for applications that comprise the environment

2. Rather than a "devbox", devs use something like Docker Compose to utilize the images locally. Presumably this would be configured identically to the proposed devbox, except with something like a volume pointing to local code.

I'm interested in learning more about this. It seems like a way to get things done locally without involving too many cloud services. Is this how most people do it?

fnordpiglet• 2 years ago

It’s $250/month for a c6g 2xl 1tb ebs on demand pricing go reserved instances. Given they use AWS and are a major customer, you can expect excellent pricing above the above public pricing quote.

Considering the cost of a developers time, and you can do shenanigans to drive that even lower, this all feels totally reasonable.

closeparen2• 2 years ago

I find the devbox approach very frustrating because the JetBrains IDEs are leaps and bounds ahead of everything else in terms of code intelligence, but only work well locally. VSCode is very slightly more capable than plain text editor + sync or terminal-based editor over SSH, but only slightly.

It's darkly amusing how we have all these black-magic LLM coding assistants but we can't be reasonably assured of even 2000s level type-aware autocomplete.

olejorgenb• 2 years ago

VSCode is very slightly more capable than plain text editor

What? For which languages are you talking about? For python, VSCode is leaps and bounds ahead of PyCharm if your project is well typed.

JetBrains offer a remote solution now though: https://www.jetbrains.com/remote-development/gateway/

secondcoming• 2 years ago

What's the easiest way of sharing things like protobuf definitions across multiple separate repos and making sure things are always in sync?

MrDarcy• 2 years ago

buf.build

crabbone6• 2 years ago

NB. What the article describes isn't a developer environment in the cloud. It's testing in the cloud. The editor in their model lives on the programmers' laptops, the editing happens there as well and so on. The code is deployed to cloud infrastructure for testing.

physicsguy• 2 years ago

I think for smaller companies, you can get a long way towards a lot of this with judicious use of docker-compose, and convenience scripts in a Makefile. As long as you don't do anything stupid like try and spin up 100 services when you're a team of 8, most laptops these days are sufficiently capable of handling a database, Redis, your codebase, and something like LocalStack.

PedroBatista• 2 years ago

I would say you can even go a looong way without any Docker at all.

And for the large majority of the companies/projects, if your project is so complex and heavy of resources that it doesn't fit on a modern laptop, the problem is not in the laptop, it's in the whole project and the culture and cargo-cult around "modern" software development.

vlovich123• 2 years ago

Containers/VMs are a nice way to isolate away any machine configuration discrepancies. Conversely it does encourage the use of non hermetic and deterministic build systems which come with other issues too (eg speed differences surfacing race conditions in the build)

elktown• 2 years ago

- "A single-binary app behind a load-balancer might scale to far beyond our needs, but the promotion/resume trade-off can't be justified."

adamdecaf4• 2 years ago

We’ve been using a hundred repositories and a hundred Go services in a local docker-compose setup that’s worked fairly well. CI runners can struggle if their disks can’t keep up with Docker.

It comes up that we should make a devprod for front end folks to make the backend abstracted more.

Overall a lot of people prefer local dev because it gives them access to the entire stack, lets them run branch images easier, and has better performance than remote boxes.

https://moov.io/blog/education/moovs-approach-to-setup-and-t...

prasoonds• 2 years ago

I wonder if there’s a devbox-as-a-service tool out there. I use a MacBook Air for most of my work and on occasion would be benefited by using a beefier machine in the cloud. I just don’t want to set up a machine, set up sync etc.

metachris• 2 years ago

You could just rent a beefy server for like $40/month at hetzner or OVH and use VS Code with the remote development extension.

stealthybox5• 2 years ago

This is an awesome writeup of the tools and culture issues you run into maintaining dev environments.

From post, the problems that justified central dev boxes are roughly: 1. dependency / config mgmt / env drift on laptops 2. collaboration / debugging between engineers 3. compute scaling + optimization 4. supporting devs with updates and infra changes

The last one is particularly interesting to me, because supporting the dev env is separate engineering role/task that starts small and grows into teams of engineers supporting the environment.

I'm helping build Flox. We're working on these pain points by making environments (deps, vars, services, and builds) workable across all kinds of Mac/Linux laptops and servers. 1) a. Virtualize the pkg manager per-project b. Nix packages can install across OS/arch pretty well 2) Imperative actions like `flox install`/`upgrade` always edit a declarative env manifest.toml -- share it via git 3) less Docker VM's -- get more out of devteam Macbooks 4) reduce toil with a versioned, shareable envs --> less sending ad-hoc config and brew commands to people (as mentioned in the post.) Just `git pull && flox activate`.

I think on problem point #2, collab tools are advancing to where, pairing on features, bugs, and env issues can be done without central SSH. (ex: tmate, vscode liveshare, screensharing, etc) -- however, that does sort of fall apart on laptops for async debugging of env issues (ex: when devprod is in the US, and eng is in London). Having universal telemetry on ephemeral cloud dev-boxes with a registry and all of the other DNS and SSH goodies could be the kind of infra to aspire to as your small teams run into more big-team problems.

In the Stripe anecdote, adopting the centralized infra created new challenges that their devprod teams were dedicated to supporting: - international latency from central, US-based VM's - syncing code to the dev boxes (https://facebook.github.io/watchman/) - linting, formatting, generating configs (run it locally or serverside?) - a dev workflow CLI tool dedicated to dev-box workflows and sync'ing with watchman's clock - IaaS, registry, config, glue for all the servers

This is all very non-trivial work, but maybe there's a future where people can win some portability with Flox when they are small and grow into those new challenges when it's truly needed -- now their laptop environments just get a quick `flox activate` on some new, shiny servers or Cloud IDE's.

I really like the notes from the author on how useing Language Server Protocol across a high latency link has great optimizations that work along side the watchman sync for real-time code editing.

vfclists• 2 years ago

How does a payment service wind up with over a 1000 engineers?

I understand that "engineers" may not mean "developers", it could DevOps, site reliability and all the bits and pieces that make up a large service provider, but over a 1000?

Can someone please enlighten me?

itsjustjordan• 2 years ago

Surely in 2024 we can't be classifying Stripe as just "a payment service"

bartonfink• 2 years ago

What else have they done that's worth giving a shit about?

intelVISA2• 2 years ago

It's a fair question, I think you need ~10 or so to do the work and 990 to bikeshed the horrors that come about when you have what should be a few 3mb HTTPS APIs at $50-100pcm split between 1000 resume-hungry engineers and a taste for cloud complexity.

fragmede2• 2 years ago

probably has something to do with the products that go beyond accepting credit cards listed on https://docs.stripe.com/products, though I suspect operating just the credit card accepting part is harder than you imagine.

ronef• 2 years ago

I love this. I believe I might have even interfaced with your team around that time. I was leading Facebook's (now Meta) Developer Products team and we were building against super similar areas internally.

We ran back then a similar project that I coined "Developer On-Demand" to tackle that same problem space. It's also what eventually lead me to find the magics of Nix and then build Flox.

I also agree with a lot of what was shared in other comments, while the problems we tackled at large orgs such as Facebook, Shopify, Uber, Google (to name a few teams I remember working with) and obviously also Stripe, certain areas of the pain are 100% universal regardless of team size.

On the Flox side, we're trying to help with a few of them today and many more hopefully in the soon future, very open for thoughts! Things like - simple to use Nix for each of your projects + keep deps and config up to date across everyones Macbooks and Linux boxes, etc -- even if you don't have a full AWS team and Language Server team ready to support.

codethief8• 2 years ago

Very insightful blog post!

Finally: the development experience, of course, is only part of the story: the full lifecycle of code and features continues onward into CI and code review and ultimately through deployment into production, where it will be further observed, debugged, and evolved. Writing about those systems would require further posts at least this long.

In case the author is around: I would love to read those!

nivertech• 2 years ago

This post is more about syncing between local and remote dev environments than about monorepos.

Stripe's Monorepo Developer Environment

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