scaling down without scaling down

For quite a few years now i always upgraded or rebuilt my work machine to the latest and greatest. This time i decided to try something different. I bought a nice lightweight laptop and began using codespaces for my development. While great, the pricing wasn't really what I wanted to pay for a development environment. So I started looking for alternatives and found coder.

coder is a tool which allows you to deploy your own codespaces like environments which are named workspaces. The workspace deployments are managed with terraform and can be deployed to any cloud provider. This is great because it allows you to scale up and down as needed and does not require to learn a new configuration or templating language. Since i personally don't like AWS and Azure still does not seem to properly support ipv6 (see github actions) I decided to go with hetzner cloud. A good starting point was this template by ntimo. I made a few changes to install most of the tools I regularly use and need like docker, zsh, etc. and it's great to have a workspace which is always available and can be accessed from anywhere. Using the coder cli i can easily connect to the workspace and start working.

For now i'm quite happy how fast the workspaces start and how well they work. I hope to be able to use this setup for a while and plan on creating my own images which include all my favorite defaults.

My current template can be found here

https://github.com/0xC9C3/coder_hetzner_template