John Andrew Entwistle

Co-founder

As COVID-19 continues to spread and impact communities, many organizations are implementing remote work policies to protect their employees. The development community and our customers have come to us looking to leverage <a href="https://coder.com/">Coder</a> during a work from home mandate, particularly within regulated enterprises. We are committed to ensuring our customers are able to continue pushing technological boundaries whether they’re working from the office or anywhere in the world.

Software engineers working in organizations impacted by unexpected business disruptions need to go through a significant amount of effort to get their home environment into the same state as their work environment. The process of installing programming languages, testing frameworks, development utilities, and other tooling is time-consuming, error-prone, and dependent on the underlying machine’s operating system. Time spent setting up this environment can slow down a project’s trajectory and cause development environment drift between team members.

Engineers working in a regulated industry or on sensitive code and data sets may have to put their project on hold until the disruption is resolved. In their case, they’re not allowed to work on the project outside of the organization’s internal infrastructure and network. This is the case for many of our customers.

<a href="https://coder.com/docs/introduction">Coder</a> was built to power and secure an organization’s development environments, including operating in an air-gapped configuration. Engineers using Coder can access their development environments on any machine, all through their browser. This remote access provides a consistent and preconfigured environment no matter what endpoint machine is used to access it.

Development environments on Coder are run on the organization’s secure internal infrastructure and accessed through the standard network and security policies in place across the organization. Centralizing development environments provides visibility and insight into potential security threats, allows updates and patches to be rolled out across the development organization, and ensures that intellectual property isn’t stored on local endpoints. This enables engineers to work on sensitive source code and data sets, without requiring that the intellectual property leave the organization’s protected network.

Coder works with any version control provider, your existing CI, and any internal tools your organization may need to be productive.

<ul>
<li>Git — GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket</li>
<li>Editor — VSCode, Intellij, PyCharm, Eclipse, Jupyter Notebooks, and more.</li>
<li>Kubernetes Infrastructure — Google Cloud, AWS, Azure, on-premises and more</li>
</ul>

This is a challenging time for engineers and organizations across the globe. We are here to help our customers and engineers do their jobs in good times and bad.

Secure and Productive Software Development During a Work From Home Mandate

Throughout the years DevOps best practices have driven IT innovation for large organizations’, shortening the development life cycle. But every year, organizations face IP theft, breaches, and inside threats. It’s these challenges that lead to a focus on security within the DevOps pipeline. 

In this article we discuss how Coder can serve as the first foundational step in an organization’s DevSecOps process by providing developers with productive, consistent, and secure development environments. 

<h2>Some Background: What is DevSecOps?</h2>

DevSecOps serves as an extension to DevOps by addressing security risks and vulnerabilities throughout the software development life cycle. As organizations adopt DevSecOps within their software development teams, it is essential to empower their data scientists and software engineers with the right tools to maintain consistent, secure, and performant development environments.

<h2>DevSecOps Best Practices &amp; Some Failures</h2>

Volumes have been written about best practices for DevSecOps. There is no need to cover them all here. Instead, take a look at these three that would certainly make any comprehensive list of best practices for DevSecOps: 

<ul>
<li>source control all infrastructure templates</li>
<li>automatically scan container images and source code for vulnerabilities </li>
<li>scale services elastically in real-time</li>
</ul>

All three present good, sound advice, and all three are routinely ignored when it comes to traditional local development environments. Traditionally, developers have installed and configured development environments on their personal machines. When this occurs, as it does in most organizations, best practices are not applied. 

Running the development environment on the user’s isolated endpoint limits the available resources for tasks and adds more security overhead by having to protect the intellectual property on each user’s isolated endpoint.

Furthermore, the development environment isn’t being source controlled like the infrastructure is in DevSecOps. This makes it difficult and time-consuming for new engineers or engineers switching projects to get their machine in the correct state to work on an application or data set. The engineer has to install the correct version of the project’s programming language, frameworks, and tooling just to start contributing. This installation and setup process is error-prone, very difficult in zero-trust environments, and creates onboarding overhead for development teams.

<h2>Bringing the Development Environment into DevSecOps</h2>

*With Coder, the development environment fits into the DevSecOps pipeline alongside the rest of the development workflow. *

All development actions and source code are centralized on an organization’s internal infrastructure. This allows engineers to use elastic compute resources to complete tasks, while also reducing the security overhead of the organization by keeping all intellectual property inside the centralized infrastructure. Coder works seamlessly within the most restrictive air-gapped environments, providing productivity in a zero-trust environment for software engineers and data scientists.

Each development environment is created from an image that is defined by the team. These images contain all of the required software dependencies to get started working on a project immediately, thus removing any installation and setup onboarding overhead. These image definitions can also be source controlled, providing an organization with “development environments as code”, similar to how “infrastructure as code” is currently used in a DevSecOps pipeline. This functionality allows for productivity and security to be in harmony, bringing the development velocity of a startup to the enterprise.

<h2>Conclusion</h2>

Providing developers with productive, consistent, and secure development environments is must for any successful DevSecOps. The best way to do that is move developer environments off of local machines and into the cloud where they can be orchestrated, managed, and best practices applied. 

Coder makes reproducing and managing consistent development environments in the cloud simple, allowing you to define dev environments as code and spin up new environments quickly and securely.

Learn more about how <a href="https://coder.com/devsecops">Coder fits into your DevSecOps workflow</a> or download our <a href="https://coder.com/whitepapers/devsecops-playbook">DevSecOps playbook</a> for a broader overview of supporting remote development with cloud-based developer environments.

With Coder, the development environment fits into the DevSecOps pipeline alongside the rest of the development workflow. 

How Coder can improve your DevSecOps initiative

What if your local computer could double as a portal to limitless computational power and storage? What if you could build applications and collaborate quickly and easily with distributed teams in real time? That is our dream for Coder — to remove the limitations of local machines for software engineers.

It is just over a year since we hired our first full-time employee, but coder has been a long time in the making. I met my co-founders when I was 13 running a small game server company. When I needed an extra set of hands, I did what any aspiring tech executive would do — I googled “plugin engineer”. One contact form later and my co-founder Kyle Carberry and I were working away together. Things were growing quickly when I caught wind of a soon to be legendary systems architect. A few Skype conversations later and Ammar Bandukwala joined our small band of brothers.

There we were, a 13-year-old plugin engineer in Saskatoon Canada, a 12-year-old systems architect in Alabama, and a 13-year-old in New York filling our days with twelve hour Skype calls — always working toward “the next big thing”. Over the next several years we evolved from building game servers to building DDOS mitigation platforms, 1M+ monthly visitor websites, and peer-to-peer file-sharing companies.

In the process, we earned more than our fair share of battle scars from running businesses driven by software development workflows. Through these companies, we gained a first-hand understanding of the value of the cloud. Our spec sheets, our repositories, and our products all lived in the cloud — so why were we writing code on our local computers? Why did we have to screen share to debug or have our CPU pegged as we ran tests on intermittent changes? The idea of “google docs” for code wasn’t a new one, but we knew that if we didn’t want to use existing solutions — there was a problem to be solved— and who better to tackle it than three teenagers spread thousands of miles apart?

Right after high school, we set out to build Coder. We packed our things, left our hometowns, and moved into a tin shack in Austin, Texas to build our new company side-by-side.

The Shack, 2017

A year later ( and in a slightly bigger office), we stand together as a team of over 20 united by a shared passion for software. I couldn’t be more grateful for our team’s shared encouragement, patience, and sacrifice.

Coder Headquarters, 2018

Joining our team as part of our 4.5M series seed is <a href="https://uncorkcapital.com/">Uncork Capital</a> and <a href="https://www.redpoint.com/">Redpoint Ventures</a> as co-leads.

Along with, <a href="https://foundersfund.com/">Founders Fund</a>, <a href="https://www.capitalfactory.com/">Capital Factory</a>, and several strategic individual investors: <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/jkodumal">John Kodumal</a>, [Quinn Slack]<a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/quinnslack">https://www.linkedin.com/in/quinnslack</a>), Grant Gregory, <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/alec-guettel-041b131">Alec Guettel</a>, <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-rosenblatt-a250294">David Rosenblatt</a>, and Gregory Kennedy from <a href="https://www.advectioncap.com/">Advection Growth Capital LLC</a>.

Coder Series Seed

It’s been about two months since our public alpha release, and we’ve been encouraged, inspired and humbled by the enormous number of people trying out coder globally across 125 countries… We have students analyzing the human genome, CEOs coding on their chromebooks, and engineers inside of fortune 50 companies, all using <a href="https://coder.com/?__hstc=146157355.d5158744feca40af9ee267cec57186ed.1598396343940.1598396343940.1600805931971.2&__hssc=146157355.1.1600805931971&__hsfp=864539785">Coder</a> — the scope of use cases and possibilities are incredible. We’ve put our product in the world, and we’ve received so much feedback and love in return. It is this community that is shaping our product.

Imagine a world where it no longer matters the kind of hardware you have, where an internet connection allows you to harness 30x the resources of a brand new MacBook… Imagine servers powering the tools we love and have contributed to. We’re well on our way to making it all a reality and truly look forward to working together to shape Coder.

<hr>

We&#39;re passionate about creating idiomatic software for the world. If that relates to you, <a href="https://coder.com/careers">let&#39;s work together</a> .

AI-native Development

Secure Environments for 2,500+ Developers

John Andrew Entwistle

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