Self-hosted Cloud Development Environment (CDE) reduces the time required for developers to submit their first line of code to less than five minutes
CDEs are gaining in popularity and necessity due to the increasing complexity of today’s developer environments. According to the Gartner® Hype Cycle™ for Emerging Technologies, 2023 “CDEs provide remote, ready-to-use access to a cloud-hosted development environment with minimal effort for setup and configuration. This decoupling of the development workspace from the physical workstation enables a low-friction, consistent developer experience. CDEs comprise elements of a traditional Integrated Developer Environment (IDE), such as code editing, debugging, code review and code collaboration. They increasingly include ML-based coding assistants and integrate with DevOps platforms”.(1) “Gartner predicts that by 2026, 60% of cloud workloads will be built and deployed using CDEs”.(1)
Coder 2.0 streamlines CDE workflows and improves experience for both developers and platform engineering teams by removing productivity bottlenecks. CDEs are computationally faster, more streamlined and more secure than local development environments, greatly reducing the need for manual configuration. With Coder, users enjoy the local development experience with all of the security, power and scalability of the cloud.
“After 13 years as a developer productivity engineer, I see cloud-based development as the right model for where developers should be going. Coder simplifies cloud-based development so that developers can focus on their work,” said Elliot Graebert, Skydio’s Director of Engineering, Infrastructure. “With Coder, Skydio was able to run 10 times more active development environments for the same price as their previous solution. The benefits are so compelling that a third of Skydio’s developers are using Coder on a daily basis.”
New features in Coder 2.0 include:
- Envbuilder for Dev Containers, an open source project by Coder based on the Microsoft Dev Containers specification. Envbuilder enables users to control their development environments without affecting infrastructure or requiring the work of DevOps and Platform teams.
- Template Registry, a central repository to discover and browse Coder configuration Templates. The Template Registry includes launches with hundreds of Coder-certified and community-contributed Templates, making it easy to get started with Coder for a variety of developer tooling and cloud providers.
- Integration with JFrog, extending the security of your software supply chain to the developer desktop. The single-click integration provides the ability to securely store Coder resources in JFrog Artifactory, as well as expose Xray health and status information directly in the Coder user interfaces.
All features in Coder 2.0 will be available in Coder Open Source.
Development Environments for Individual Developers to Enterprise Teams
Coder was co-founded by Ammar Bandukwala and Kyle Carberry based on their shared vision to remove the limitations of local machines for developers. Initially, they collaborated to deliver “Google docs” for code, but quickly evolved their mission to building solutions designed to remove friction from the developer experience. Today, Coder and its founders remain driven by the goal of keeping developers in flow by providing limitless computational power and storage, allowing developers to build applications and collaborate quickly and easily, in real time. Coder delivers three offerings for developers and development teams. They are:
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- code-server, a browser-based IDE loved by individual developers, garnering more than 65,000 Github stars. The code-server VS Code IDE is always free and never feature-restricted.
- Coder Open Source Software, a full CDE provisioning solution that leverages HashiCorp Terraform to provision all back-end infrastructure. Effortless customization gives developers and small development teams complete control over development environments. Coder OSS is never feature-restricted.
- Coder Enterprise, an open-core, commercial offering with additional security, governance, and observability features. Coder Enterprise is much faster and easier than platforms that require Kubernetes to run in containers, or only run on specific clouds. Trusted by Palantir, major financial institutions, and SaaS solutions that collectively serve 1.7 trillion users, Coder Enterprise is essential for platform teams supporting developers.
“Coder is the first CDE designed with both the developer and the operator in mind. Our mission is to enable developers to create self-serve development environments that they can access from anywhere, without the burden of hosting code on their laptops and without DevOps or platform engineering involvement,” said CEO Rob Whiteley. “At the same time, Coder provides DevOps and Platform teams with a powerful abstraction to quickly spin up, replicate, and spin down developer workspaces. By expressing development workspaces as code, we pull the last part of development — the developer workstation — into the cloud era. This results in faster releases, increased developer satisfaction and more productive organizations.”
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