In my day to day activity I need to run locally some containers for development and operation purposes. Till now, I used docker running on my desktop, a 2020 MacBook Pro, 16GB RAM.

Lately, I had to set up tight docker desktop resource limits to 4GB RAM, 2CPU if I wanted that responsiveness of other apps in my desktop would not be affected by locally running containers. Even doing that, laptop fans do lot of noise and things became a bit bumpy, and some container jobs took extra time to complete on only 2 CPUs…

Additionally, you know MacBook Pro x86 is a dead product but for some of us, moving to ARM has some implications both in the way we build and test containers for production x86 cloud infra, so I would prefer to stick to x86 platform dockers. What should I do when I need to renew my laptop?

Moving to a different OS for the desktop is not an option for me at this moment. Going back to Windows to end up running everything on WSL or moving to Linux Desktop and use Office 365 on browser seem too annoying for me.

So my requirements are:

• Stay on MacOS if possible.
• Run docker containers on x86, multiplatform containers not a valid option for me.
• Avoid resource starvation on desktop apps.

So I decided to split up my environment to stay on my current MacBook Pro but use an extra Intel NUC device as my development docker runtime (without any VM layer). That would let me use all my laptop resources for local apps as VSCode, Browser, Office365, etc. to run smoothly.

For my tests, I used NUC7CJYSAL device, with 8GB RAM and 512 SATA SSD. It has 2 a Core Celeron CPU, with no HT support (only 2 system threads). I installed Ubuntu LTS on it and configured certificates to access by ssh without password.

Using VSCode remote option, I can run the IDE on my laptop but with ‘filesystem’ of the NUC. VSCode terminal is NUC terminal so any docker command is run agains NUC docker runtime. Of course, you need your repos downloaded locally on the NUC, but using ssh agent option you can ‘export’ your ssh certs over ssh so your github certificate is magically available for you on the NUC.

But, would this set up mean I need to carry both laptop and NUC everywhere I go?. That is the magic part. I’m currently a Tailscale personal VPN service user, so I added my NUC as device on may Tailscale account. Now, from my laptop I can access my NUC VPN IP anywhere with internet access and I can keep the NUC running at home. An extra benefit is that you can keep things running on NUC and be able to disconnect your laptop (eg. running build or deployment jobs while your daily conmute).

If you add an /etc/host alias in your laptop, combined with cert based ssh authentication, you can easily connect form VSCode or iTerm. You can even share folders on the NUC and connect to them from desktop in case it is needed.

With this configuration, I can evolve both desktop and NUC independently, so in the future I can switch to ARM laptop or a different OS and also focus the laptop resources to run UI based apps (VSCode, Browser, office) without resource constrictions from the development runtime NUC.

I’m currently using this set up and decided to stay with it but using a more powerful i7/16G NUC device. Hope this post brought you any ideas!!