I'm curious about your setup as I might have to do something similar soon due to my machine's performance constraints. I understand you can connect to a Jupyter server remotely, but how do you sync your code? Do you have your Git repo cloned on the remote host and just run Git commands over SSH? Or does VS Code have some kind of integration for remote file systems with version control?

My code resides entirely on the remote EC2 instance while VS Code UI runs locally. There is no sync as such. You’re working off the remote copy via SSH. (I do back up my code periodically)

VS code takes care of spinning up the remote Jupyter server. All I have to do is create a new .ipynb file and everything happens automatically. Execution and disk are remote, only the UI is local. This is the magic.

It’s exactly like SSH except you have a rich client IDE in VS Code. The only data that moves over the network is what is needed to display output in VS Code. You have to try it to see.

Check out the remote SSH (https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/ssh) extension. It makes everything really painless. I'm currently developing a website that resides in a docker container in a digitalocean server, and editing the code in VSCode feels literally no different at all to running it locally. If you have the SSH keys set up it's completely painless.

The other nice thing about VSCode is that you can extend it with VSCode Neovim (https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=asvetlia...), which runs a headless version of Neovim and allows you to do all the wonderful things that that entails, including stuff like VSCode's native multiple cursor implementation (and Lua config files!). All in all it's a great workflow, it's pretty light, and if you're paying for (or self-hosting) a beefy server it can turn any laptop into a powerhouse.

This is great, thanks. Commenting to bookmark for future reference.

Really interesting setup. What kind of monthly expense does this run?

And on a separate but related note, does it change the way you think about how you spend your time coding? (Assuming the costs do ramp up with usage such that time literally does equal money?)

I’ve no idea what the cost is since the company pays for it — I do need the horsepower to run some really large models and I suspect most people don’t need this kind of spec. But for my company it’s just part of the cost of doing business.

There’s no IT and I can provision instances of any type (subject to limits) at any time.

VSCode is free if you self-host it. There are corporate tiers with virtual desktops etc, and you can pay for services as GitHub pilot if you want.

Anyhow there a wealth of free extensions to customize it and the setup is really straightforward. I have version management git in a private GitHub project for version management. You can add extensions for rendering graphs in good quality and importing and exporting stuff is easy.

I have not been able to figure out why some people prefer to use Jupiter notebook as it is.

Do you turn that lightbulb off at night when you clock out? Just curious.

32 vCPU / 256 GB instances like r6a.8xlarge is about $900/month (r6ad which has local disk is about $100/month more), I don't see there being much other major costs with such setup?

Unlike individuals, large enterprises rarely pay sticker price but a heavily discounted negotiated rate for software and services. I can’t say how much exactly but it’s less than that.

With respect to EDP, AWS doesn't do "discounted negotiated rates", only discounts tied to specific committed spend levels (non-negotiated).