When you’re building clouds (as opposed to cloud applications), you need heavy equipment. So it’s no surprise that I use a Precision M6600 17″ laptop that is capable of running a complete multi-node cloud data center.
IMHO, here are the core requirements for a Cloud Builder laptop:
- SSDs (I have two 1/4 TB of SSD): We are constantly building/installing operating systems. These are high I/O activities so SSDs are essential. I’m constantly on the edge of no free space even with 1/2 TB .
- RAM (I have 32 Gb): It’s normal for us to run multiple VMs. If you RAM starve your VMs (I used to have 16) then they page fault and you’re back to constrained disk I/O. We assign 4 GB RAM per VM because it’s just faster.
- Many Cores: VMs w/ 1 CPU = thread contention. Adding RAM and Disk can’t fix a threading issues.
- Bonus: I like a good keyboard and big display – I code, type & read a lot so the 17″ display helps.
For our devs, a normal cycle is write (desktop) -> build (in a VM) -> deploy (on additional VMs) -> full test requires >4 VMs (that’s over 16 GB RAM). I don’t want to check in code until I complete that cycle. On small RAM and spinning HDD that cycle takes >1 hour. On my laptop it is <15 minutes!
There are only a few models of laptop that can pack that type of power and they demand a premium; however, the extra umph translates into at least 3 or 4 more full cycles per day. That’s a whole lot of extra productivity.
