[Catalyst] Development environments and performance

[Dave Rolsky]

On Wed, 16 Jan 2008, Ian Docherty wrote:

>> * dev is one box per dev, with the best hardware affordable - nowadays that 
>> means at least a dual core machine with 4GB of ram and decent disks.
>
> I actually have my own development box as you suggest and it works fine but 
> our start-up company cannot afford hardware for every developer. We have a 
> managed server which replicates mostly the final live environment. (can you 
> replicate something that does not exist yet?)

In the case of a startup, I'd assume the devs would just run stuff on 
their own existing machines. That assumes you're hiring the type of people 
who have the types of machines at home that can run the type of app you're 
writing.

>> * even better is the ability to make hot copies of the production 
>> environment into VMs for the purposes of testing major upgrades (database 
>> changes, new daemons, etc). The reason to use a VM is to make the process 
>> repeatable.
>
> Not thought of this before in this context but it makes sense.

This really became an issue when I worked at Socialtext, after a couple 
flubbed upgrades. After that, we started using VMWare to create copies of 
production to test the upgrades on, and things went _much_ smoother.

>> Shared dev machines made sense about 10 years ago, but any place still 
>> using them is hopelessly backwards (err, like my current employer ;)
>
> Backward or skinflints?

In the case of my current work, it's definitely backwards. YMMV.


-dave

/*===================================================
VegGuide.Org                        www.BookIRead.com
Your guide to all that's veg.       My book blog
===================================================*/