In the ever-evolving landscape of software development, managing developer environments has become increasingly complex. With the release of Flox 1.0, a groundbreaking environment manager, Flox aims to simplify this challenge. In a recent Q&A with VMblog, Ron Efroni, the co-founder and CEO, and the visionary behind Flox, shed light on the company's journey, the challenges faced by developers, and how Flox 1.0 is poised to revolutionize the way developers manage their environments.

Efroni's insights dive into the fragmented nature of software development today, with layers of abstraction and scattered deployments complicating the process. He emphasizes the need for a solution that can flatten these layers while preserving control and ergonomics, a challenge that Flox 1.0 aims to address. By providing a user-space environment manager that allows for reproducible and cross-platform environments, Flox 1.0 promises to streamline the developer experience, enabling seamless collaboration and consistent results across different machines and platforms.

VMblog:  What have you been doing since we last caught up with you?

Ron Efroni:  It's been quite a year! We've been working with a close-knit group of beta users and improving Flox, our environment manager. We've just shipped version 1.0, and it is based on a lot of user research and direct feedback.

We learned that users wanted the ability to manage some environments as code, but also have a way to easily share others that might not exist within the context of a project. Users were required to define environments multiple times in order to run them on different platforms and architectures, which was even more impactful on their workflows than we imagined. We also learned that they would prefer not to learn a new declarative language along the way. These signals were strong, Flox 1.0 is a better tool as a result, and our research is just beginning. We have an amazing year of releases planned, and I can't wait to share them with you.

We've also been growing the team! We've added top folks from across the industry, and each member of our team is a little part of what we have just shipped today.

VMblog:  When you hear "developer environment" what does it mean to you?

Efroni:   Metaphorically, it's the context where developers do what we love: turn 1's and 0's into magic for users everywhere. It's a special kind of prepared focus, and the tools we use help us establish it.

Practically speaking, all software requires a collection of stuff in order to run, like tools, libraries, frameworks, and configuration. Without it, the code we all write either won't do anything or it can't be told to, for example, place its data in the correct cloud bucket. This melange of stuff is its environment.

There are a lot of tools that developers use to manage environments, and at the top of the list is probably Docker. You can go a long way towards managing the problem simply by having a way to isolate one environment completely from another. Container images are great for recreating a specific environment: once you build an image, you can easily conjure up the environment within it as many times as you like.

This has been a great step forward, which is why you see container images everywhere. But there's always something over the horizon; for developer environments, that's reproducibility. Container images are not always guaranteed to build reproducibly. When you build one, what happens is defined arbitrarily by the author of the image. Depending on how it was authored, that image might build differently tomorrow than it did today. Sometimes that doesn't matter...but when it does, it can matter a lot.

VMblog:  What do you think is hard about managing software today?

Efroni:  It's all become really fragmented. Every new wave of technology brings with it another layer of abstraction. New solutions promise to make everything simpler by adding that additional layer; incrementally, in some cases, they do. That new console *does* make it easier to manage all of your deployments...but, yeah, you have so, so many deployments. Everything is spread out and piled deep. Try to count the number of layers of abstraction between a pageview of that webstore and the underlying kernel running on a processor; it's overwhelming, and no single brain can understand all of it.

Maybe what we need is a way to flatten out some of these layers while preserving the control and ergonomics that they provide. It might be time to make an infrastructure smashburger.

VMblog:  What's changing about how businesses deal with software?

Efroni:  I think they're looking at software in a much more abstract way than they ever have.

It used to be something we wrote, now it's something we manage. A lot of the time, we aren't even writing it anymore! It's being generated by Copilot, or ChatGPT, or something else. We used to think of it as intellectual property to be built; now we tend to think of it as a depreciating asset, one that costs us money to create and increases in liability as time goes by. It's far more ephemeral than it used to be.

We've realized that it's always changing: not a pond, but a stream. That means thinking about our tools differently, and choosing ones that can help us stay on top of an ever-changing world.

VMblog:  How can technologies like Flox help us become better developers?

Efroni:  Technologies like Flox can help us become better developers by providing a way for us to manage environments without all of the overhead and isolation of virtual machines or containers. One that runs in userspace, and allows us to reproduce and recreate those environments over time and across platforms - and, for those moments where isolation is truly needed, one that can easily be deployed inside a container. That way, we know if it works on our machine it'll work on someone else's - and if we build it next year, it'll work the same as it did today.

It can be found at flox.dev.