I believe this kind of service is the way forward when it comes to developer tooling.
But paying $39/mo/user for having the right to deal with the deployment myself for a tool that is still alpha is pretty high.
I understand the (tremendous) value prop, but that's the kind of price I'd be expecting from a SaaS version, not from a self-hosted app. Although not giving a discount for self-hosting and a price per user is the "modern" way to do open source (see gitlab or mattermost), it still feels a bit wrong.<p>Anyway, excuse my old man rant, awesome work and good luck making a business out of it! I'll give it a try.
Why isn't this just wrapped in a single docker image or docker compose? Why do you need all these scripts? Just curious. I get its checking for docker and dependencies, but can you just get rid of the dependency problem by embedding in the docker file and have a single set of docker files that do all this work? Leverage compose after?
Ah, great to see this here!<p>Disclaimer: Know the authors, who are extremely bright engineers.<p>Based on my discussions with one of them, Hugo, re the architecture a couple weeks ago, I really think you should take a look at this if you want to do auto-provisioned dev environments in a self-hosted fashion, they know what they're doing.
Pretty nice, I have two questions:<p>1. Comparing to something like GitPod (which lets you run on your own instances as well), where do you think Hocus shines?<p>2. Given you're leveraging Firecracker for isolation, and Firecracker doesn't support GPUs, I assume that adding GPU-enabled machines isn't on your near-term roadmap?
Are you planning on using any fancy tricks to optimize large repos? I have open sourced some code I was playing with for fun here which allows you to mount a git repo as a read only FUSE file system: <a href="https://github.com/gravypod/gitfs">https://github.com/gravypod/gitfs</a><p>You can really lower IOPS/memory/disk usage with an approach like this.
This seems to be at the same level of how Meta manages their dev environments. You pick the environment right from VS code and it spins up an environment.<p>I think<p>> Add multi-node support<p>will be important for non trivial project development where the 2 distinct environments might be needed to talk to each other like say for prototyping or "sharing configs"..
I see Docker listed as a requirement, and I am familiar with Docker. The repo mentions using Firecracker, a microVM that I've only ever heard of. What is the relation, if any, between these two? Is this a wrong question: if this uses Firecracker why is Docker involved?
This is actually something I wish we had at my previous company. Setting up the environment was a pain, and very few people knew how to run all the tests (integration tests really). I am willing to give Hocus a go.
Very intrigued. With the real VM isolation, I wonder if I could use this as a way of dipping my toe into the Nix pool.<p>Have you given any thought to offering pre-baked development templates? For example, here is a standard Django build with poetry + js utilities + Postgres drivers + jq, etc.