Marc Paquette

Freelance Writer

<p>In a previous CDE 101 post, we learned <a href="https://coder.com/blog/what-is-a-cloud-development-environment">what a cloud development environment is</a>. Now we can cover how a platform engineering team defines a development environment for developers to work from.</p>

<p>In a conventional setup, developers have full reign over their development environment. That’s certainly flexible, but in large enterprise organizations this results in costly, frustrating inconsistencies that slow down development and tie up the IT team needlessly with one-off support problems.</p>

<p>A CDE uses workspaces and templates to avoid these problems while still giving developers a productive, useful environment. A template declares what’s in a development environment and how its parts interact. Developers consume the template to create their own workspace. A workspace gives developers access to a development environment that’s ready to use. Developers don’t need to provision resources, install build tools, hunt for missing dependencies, or even pull code from repos. The template declares how to do all this for them ahead of time.</p>


Workspaces vs. Templates: The Building Blocks of CDEs | Cloud Development Environments 101 Series

<h2>Iterative collaboration</h2>

<p>One of the advantages of dividing development environments into workspaces and templates is the separation of concerns:</p>

<ul>
<li>The platform engineering team defines development environments with templates. </li>
<li>Developers consume these templates to create their own workspaces.</li>
</ul>

<p>In the early phases of adopting a CDE, the platform team is typically the only gatekeeper for templates. On the surface this looks like a rigid delineation of responsibilities. In fact it allows both flexibility and maintainability as the organization’s CDE adoption matures. Developers can customize their workspaces, but within guardrails defined by the platform team to avoid the problems of conventional setups.</p>

<p>The workspace-template lifecycle ends up being a collaborative, iterative one. Developers suggest improvements to the platform engineering team and the platform team applies true engineering processes to implement these improvements. Developers get what they need while the platform engineering team ensures consistency, stability, security, and whatever other requirements the enterprise needs.</p>

<p>For even greater flexibility, the platform team might choose to expose the template repository to developers. Developers could edit templates themselves, or develop entirely new templates, then make pull requests. The platform team decides which changes to test, accept, and publish on the CDE.</p>


<h2>Templates are code</h2>

<p>To manage templates and workspaces, a CDE follows the “everything as code” approach. It’s a powerful paradigm that, not surprisingly, suits development environments well. The template declares all the details of a complete environment so that the developer doesn’t have to. The CDE then uses the template to create workspaces that are ready to use. </p>


<p>This brings benefits that are difficult, if not impossible, to achieve with a conventional setup: </p>

<p><strong>Consistency and repeatability:</strong> The CDE precisely follows the template to stand up and tear down identical workspaces for developers, every time.</p>

<p><strong>Auditability:</strong> Templates are human-readable, making them reviewable, editable, and versionable.</p>

<p><strong>Reliability, performance, and security:</strong> The platform team can apply its own processes to test a template before making it available to developers. If a problem is discovered with a freshly-revised template, they can always revert to the older version.</p>

<p><strong>Flexibility:</strong> A template gives the platform engineering team the flexibility to consolidate or spread out developer infrastructure to suit the situation.</p>


<h2>Workspaces are consistent but still flexible</h2>

<p>Each developer accesses their environment through a workspace. In the CDE, the developer chooses a template to create their own workspace. The CDE ensures that each of the parts declared in the template are provisioned, running, and securely interconnected. Each developer gets their own workspace and all workspaces are identical for the whole team. That’s a big advantage over conventional development environments. </p>

<p>But developers need to adapt their environments to the project or their own preferences, which is crucial for developer experience and productivity. To support this, a CDE offers a few choices. After all, CDEs promise the power and flexibility of the cloud.</p>

<p>Template parameters, declared by the platform team, let the developer customize a workspace when starting it. This is useful for projects or tasks where a developer needs to adjust something specific about the environment, like choosing the number of CPU cores or specific repos. Because parameters are defined in the template, the platform team can ensure that these customizations don’t impair the environment’s stability, performance, or security.</p>

<p>Or the platform team can use the CDE access control features to make some templates available to specific developers or teams. For example, developers in a machine learning team might have access to templates that provision extra GPU capacity.   </p>


<h2>Flexibility in the cloud</h2>

<p>A template declares workspaces. The platform team codes and maintains the templates, while developers use them to create their own workspaces. No matter how many developers use the template, all the workspaces start in the same state. This repeatability doesn’t limit developer experience, though. The “everything-as-code” approach, as well as the capabilities of the template itself, give the platform team and developers choices for taking advantage of the cloud. </p>


Workspaces and templates follow the “everything as code” paradigm. A template is the code that declares a development environment, and workspaces are the instantiation of development environments.

Everything As Code: Workspaces vs Templates

<h2>Intro</h2>

<p>In previous articles we covered <a href="https://coder.com/blog/what-is-a-cloud-development-environment">what a CDE is</a>, its <a href="https://coder.com/blog/benefits-of-cloud-based-development-platforms">benefits</a>, and a few <a href="https://coder.com/blog/comparison-of-development-environments">ways to develop in the cloud</a>. Now we can talk specifically about Coder Premium, a CDE platform for enterprise users.</p>


What Makes a Great CDE For Enterprise Users? | Cloud Development Environments 101 Series

<h2>Coder history</h2>

<p>It’s a common story: Coder was developed by developers to solve a developer’s problem. </p>

<p>Coder co-founders Ammar Bandukwala, Kyle Carberry, and John Andrew Entwistle met in high school. Frustrated by the complications of collaborating remotely, they looked to cloud technologies to solve common obstacles like “<a href="https://coder.com/blog/it-works-on-my-machine-explained">works for me</a>”, repeating solutions for the same problems, and just getting up to speed quickly. </p>

<p>In 2017 they started to build what eventually became Coder, a platform to consistently and easily provision remote development environments. Coder is now used by many of the world’s largest organizations in <a href="https://coder.com/success-stories/global-investment-firm">financial services</a>, <a href="https://coder.com/success-stories/skydio">autonomous drones</a>, <a href="https://coder.com/success-stories/discord">social media</a>, and more.</p>


<h2>Coder philosophy</h2>

<p>From the beginning, Coder puts power in the hands of developers, bringing the advantages of the cloud while freeing them from the obstacles of managing and monitoring development environments. Coder aims to be flexible, scalable, secure, and easy to use for everyone, not just developers. </p>

<p>Coder is based on industry-standard technologies for provisioning, networking, and security. It’s open source, with both Coder engineers and an active community making contributions. This puts power in the hands of the platform engineering team, giving them transparency and more choices on the architecture and deployment of their organization’s developer infrastructure.</p>

<p>Coder is cloud-native, but it runs anywhere. Host Coder on your infrastructure, on a hyperscaler, or any combination. Workspaces can run anything that can be provisioned by a <a href="https://developer.hashicorp.com/terraform">Terraform</a> template. That means your development environments can use any software and tool that is supported by macOS, Windows, or Linux. To give you an idea of how to take advantage of this flexibility, take a look at <a href="https://registry.coder.com/">Coder Registry</a>, a directory of ready-to-use templates and modules to integrate Coder with third party platforms and developer tools.</p>


<h2>Choose your hosting, control your spend</h2>

<p>Coder is not a SaaS, it’s 100% self-hosted and self-maintained software. You choose the hosting infrastructure based on your own in-house resources, budget, security, and performance needs. Among other benefits, this gives the enterprise more choices for raising performance when it’s needed or using more cost-effective services. For example, you get to choose the cloud storage types that meet your performance, security, or cost requirements.</p>

<p>Coder Premium gives the enterprise platform engineering team plenty of options for using resources efficiently:</p>

<ul>
<li><a href="https://coder.com/docs/admin/templates/managing-templates/schedule">Workspace scheduling</a> tears down development environments when they aren’t needed.</li>
<li><a href="https://coder.com/docs/admin/templates/extending-templates/parameters#required-and-optional-parameters">Build parameters</a> give developers the choice to use extra resources when they choose, within guardrails set by the platform engineering team. </li>
<li>Assign <a href="https://coder.com/docs/admin/users/quotas">quotas</a> to limit usage to a predetermined point.</li>
<li>Use <a href="https://coder.com/docs/admin/users/groups-roles">groups and roles management</a> to give specific users access to more resource-intensive workspaces.</li>
</ul>


<h2>Security</h2>

<p>There are several aspects to Coder’s security, from its flexibility for deployment and how it interacts with external services, to the auditability of its open source code.</p>

<p>All user-workspace connections are end-to-end encrypted. For better performance while maintaining secure connections, when possible, Coder makes direct connections between users and workspaces. </p>

<p>For monitoring and managing access, Coder Premium provides audit logging and group- and role-based access control to support general IT governance policies.</p>

<p>From a deployment standpoint, an enterprise has a range of solutions for security, from third party cloud-based services for repos and registries to running air-gapped environments completely offline. Coder’s flexibility and cloud-native approach make this possible, letting an enterprise implement architectures for development environments without exposing these complexities to developers.</p>

<p>Finally, Coder is auditable by anyone, not just customers. It’s <a href="https://github.com/coder/coder">open source</a>, so issues, pull requests and reviews, and discussions are <a href="https://github.com/coder/coder">open for anyone to view</a>.</p>


<h2>Productivity starts with ease of use</h2>

<p>Developer productivity and experience is important. We’ve designed and implemented Coder to support developers first, giving them consistent, ready-to-use, familiar development environments.  </p>

<p>Developers can start a complete development environment at the literal click of a button in Coder’s web interface. They interact with their workspace from their preferred IDE or editor, including VS Code (native or <a href="https://github.com/coder/code-server">browser-based</a>), JetBrains IDEs, SSH, or even just a browser-based terminal.</p>


<p>Coder creates workspaces from templates that the platform engineering team defines. The team can manage and monitor all workspaces from a single place. Coder Premium adds other administrative features like bulk operations to update, delete, start, and stop multiple workspaces in one shot.</p>


<h2>Stability</h2>

<p>Like security, there’s more than one aspect to Coder’s stability. It comes from Coder’s openness and flexibility.
Coder is an active open source project. Many eyes see its code every day, both at Coder and in the community. That means transparent development, including open communication for defects and their resolutions. </p>

<p>As for administration, the enterprise self-maintains Coder the way they choose, deciding when to open and close maintenance windows for updates. For example, provider-scheduled maintenance windows won’t interfere with geographically dispersed development teams. Also, the enterprise can stage and test system updates before applying to production.</p>


<h2>Scalability</h2>

<p>Coder Premium is truly an enterprise ready, globally-scalable CDE. Every day, enterprises use it to manage dozens, hundreds, or thousands of dev environments. Being cloud-native, it works well with Kubernetes. An enterprise can arrange resources with <a href="https://coder.com/docs/admin/networking/workspace-proxies">workspace proxies</a> and access control to match the org chart and geographical locations.</p>


<h2>Support for enterprise organizations</h2>

<p>Enterprise organizations need development infrastructure that goes beyond installation, like coordinating globally-dispersed dev teams, integrating with external authenticators, and ensuring high availability, to name a few. Coder Premium comes with features that support these needs: </p>

<ul>
<li>Service level agreement (SLA).</li>
<li>Ticket-based technical support to connect directly to Coder.</li>
<li>In-house expertise to guide you through architectural and deployment decisions.</li>
<li>Custom branding for your organization.</li>
<li>More sophisticated access and organizational control.</li>
</ul>


<h2>A good CDE gives enterprise developers a great experience</h2>

<p>We believe that Coder Premium is the ultimate in CDE flexibility, power, security, and economy for the enterprise. We give you the ability to determine the tooling and resources that your developers get, the infrastructure it runs on, and within the bounds that your enterprise sets.</p>

<ul>
<li>Learn about the <a href="https://coder.com/success-stories">successes of our enterprise customers</a>. </li>
<li><a href="https://coder.com/ebooks-and-reports/ebooks/an-enterprise-buyer-s-guide-to-cloud-development-environments/success">Download our ebook</a> for details on choosing an enterprise-grade CDE.</li>
<li>Stay up to date on our projects, roadmap, and latest releases on <a href="https://github.com/coder">GitHub</a>. </li>
<li><a href="https://coder.com/">Try out Coder</a>, it takes just minutes to set up.</li>
</ul>


In previous articles we covered what a CDE is, its benefits, and a few ways to develop in the cloud. Now we can talk specifically about Coder Premium, a CDE platform for enterprise user

What Makes a Great CDE for Enterprise Users

<h2>Intro</h2>

<p>As a development effort grows from a single developer, to a team, to an organization of several teams, so do the demands on development environments. In this article, let’s look at the range of architectures for environments that can support the evolution of software development in an organization. We’ll start with the simplest dev environment and finish with the most sophisticated:</p>

<ul>
<li>The IDE and the development environment: The IDE isn’t the whole picture</li>
<li>Pure local development environment: Hosting everything on the workstation</li>
<li>Virtual Desktop Infrastructure: Putting the local environment in VDI</li>
<li>Dev container: Host the dev environment in a container</li>
<li>Cloud development environment: Run dev environments in the cloud along with tools to provision, manage, and monitor them</li>
</ul>


<h2>The IDE and the development environment</h2>

<p>The integrated development environment (IDE) is the developer’s portal into the development environment. It’s the place where the developer navigates and edits code, starts builds, and maybe runs a debugger. Because it runs locally, typically as a native app, it’s responsive and the developer can customize the IDE for their own needs with preferences and plugins.</p>

<p>But the IDE isn’t the whole picture. It’s just one component in the development environment. There are many other components that the IDE has little or no control over except to start, stop, and view progress.</p>


How to Choose the Right CDE for You? | Cloud Development Environments 101 Series

<p>This leads us to the simplest development environment, which is purely local.</p>


<h2>Pure local development environment</h2>

<p>You’ve already seen this setup in  <a href="https://coder.com/blog/what-is-a-cloud-development-environment">What is a Cloud Development Environment</a>. In a purely local dev environment, the IDE and the rest of the dev environment run locally on the developer’s workstation.</p>


<p>Besides the IDE, the other components in the environment are the tools, code, package management, and so on. The IDE isn’t meant to install these components, administer them, or specify how they integrate. The IDE’s goal is to ease day-to-day coding workflow, not manage the environment as a whole.</p>

<p>In other words, the IDE expects a complete dev environment that’s already installed, configured, and ready to use. And that’s what the developer provides with their workstation: a place to host a working development environment for the IDE.</p>

<h3>When to use it</h3>

<ul>
<li>For the single developer or a small dev team, a purely local environment works 
great. </li>
<li>Low cost to set up on a single or a few workstations.</li>
<li>The workstation has enough compute and storage capacity to adequately store, build, and run the project.</li>
</ul>

<h3>You’ve outgrown it when</h3>

<ul>
<li>Differences creep in between environments among the team’s workstations.</li>
<li>Technical onboarding is longer because the environment’s complexity has increased.</li>
<li>Build times are longer despite workstation upgrades.</li>
<li>There are more developers than there are instances of expensive hardware like GPUs.</li>
</ul>


<h2>Virtual Desktop Infrastructure</h2>

<p>Your team has grown and so has your development environment. It&#39;s time to get a handle on growing complexity and the rising cost of workstation upgrades. A common solution is to transplant the entire dev environment to virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) in the cloud.</p>


<p>The developer uses a remote desktop client, like RDP or VNC, on their workstation to log into a remote desktop instance. This immediately gives the development team more consistency by letting them create a single virtual desktop image that can be spun up for each developer. And it opens the opportunity to reduce contention for expensive hardware, since the cloud has practically limitless compute and storage resources. </p>

<p>The organization can reduce cloud spend by specifying ephemeral VMs, but this reduces customizability for the developer. And there’s the possibility that developer experience will suffer from network latency between the remote desktop client and the cloud, especially for developers far from the geographical location of the VDI.</p>

<h3>When to use it</h3>

<ul>
<li>Small and medium-sized teams with development environments that are small enough to fit on a single (virtual) machine.</li>
<li>Cloud costs are less than purchasing and upgrading workstations.</li>
</ul>

<h3>When you’ve outgrown it</h3>

<ul>
<li>The development environment has grown in size or complexity where it’s no longer practical to put in a single VM image.</li>
<li>Spending is high for the cloud compute, block storage, and software licensing to run virtual desktops.</li>
<li>Geographically remote developers suffer from too much network latency.<br></li>
</ul>


<h2>Dev containers</h2>

<p>The organization has grown into a few teams and they’ve outgrown the virtual desktops, or they want to improve dev experience and lower costs. A dev container can handle these challenges. </p>

<p><a href="https://containers.dev/">Development containers</a> are an open standard and are well-supported by many dev tools and hosting services.</p>


<p>Notice that the developer gets to work with a local IDE again while the rest of the environment is in a container. So unlike virtual desktops, the dev container setup restores customizability and responsiveness to the developer experience. </p>

<p>Being a container, it provides a proven, reliable, industry-standard way to precisely specify the development environment once then deploy it consistently as many times as needed. The cost of provisioning containers can be cheaper than virtual desktops, since containers can run on less expensive services.</p>

<p>The organization’s platform engineering team can manage the dev environments with the same container infrastructure that they’re probably using already for other application deployments. They can also manage expensive hardware more efficiently, like adding more cores to the computing instance to reduce build times.</p>

<h3>When to use it</h3>

<ul>
<li>The costs of provisioning virtual desktops, especially persistent VMs, is prohibitive</li>
<li>Give platform teams more flexibility in hosting the dev environment</li>
</ul>

<h3>When you’ve outgrown it</h3>

<ul>
<li>Managing containers for multiple teams and projects gets complicated</li>
<li>Security requirements add complication</li>
<li>Limited customizability in the containerized environment for developers</li>
<li>Dev environment hosting services lock you into their platform</li>
<li>Some projects can’t be practically encapsulated in a container, like legacy projects</li>
</ul>


<p>Cloud development environment (CDE)
The previous architectures use general-purpose platforms to host dev environments. They aren’t specialized for software development, so administering them is left to developers or the platform engineering team. </p>

<p>Now imagine a platform that solves all the problems of the previous architectures with added functionality that’s dedicated to managing, provisioning, and monitoring dev environments. That’s what a cloud development environment (CDE) platform does. We’ve already covered the advantages of CDEs in <a href="https://">Benefits of cloud-based development platforms</a>, but here’s a recap for this article.</p>


<h3>Notice a few things in this architecture:</h3>

<ul>
<li>The CDE’s control plane consolidates the management, monitoring, access control, and audit logging of development environments.</li>
<li>The CDE doesn’t dictate how the developer interacts with their environment. For example, they can use an IDE, web browser, or secure shell.</li>
<li>The CDE template can add extra convenience when starting a workspace, like automatically pulling from repos and updating dependencies.</li>
</ul>


Workspace Software Install Patterns in CDEs | Cloud Development Environments 101 Series

<p>There’s an important distinction between a CDE workspace and a dev environment. The CDE workspace encapsulates the dev environment but doesn’t impose any constraints on how the environment’s components are hosted and run. They can all run in the cloud, on-premises, in a container, a cluster, a VM, or whatever combination the project needs.</p>

<p>Then there’s scale. Spinning up and tearing down dozens of environments is straightforward enough. A CDE is capable of managing and monitoring hundreds, even thousands, of dev environments.</p>

<h3>When to use it</h3>

<ul>
<li>Need to handle the complexities driven by security, legacy, or variability in dev environments.</li>
<li>Relieves the platform team from tedious, error-prone tasks to manage complex or large-scale dev infrastructure.</li>
</ul>


<h2>Conclusion</h2>

<p>A software development team today has many choices to set up their development environment. Just an IDE and a few configuration files on a workstation is good enough for a lone developer or small team. As projects and their dev teams grow, there are better ways to handle the complexities in setting up and managing dev environments. </p>

<p>Not sure what a CDE is? Check out <a href="https://coder.com/blog/what-is-a-cloud-development-environment">What is a Cloud Development Environment</a>. </p>


As a development effort grows from a single developer, to a team, to an organization of several teams, so do the demands on development environments. In this article, let’s look at the range of architectures for environments that can support the evolution of software development in an organization. We’ll start with the simplest dev environment and finish with the most sophisticated

Comparison of Development Environments

<p>In the first article of this series, we <a href="https://coder.com/blog/what-is-a-cloud-development-environment">introduced the cloud development environment (CDE)</a>. Now let’s get into details about a CDE’s benefits. Like any platform, these benefits start from a CDE’s use of cloud technologies to provide a service that’s consistent, scalable, and flexible.</p>

<p>A small team can get away with accepting a conventional setup’s limits as the cost of doing business. In large enterprise organizations, these costs add up to the point of unsustainability. When development environments cost too much to provide as conventional setups, switching to a CDE starts to make sense:</p>

<ul>
<li>Developers get consistent environments that are loaded at the literal click of a button.</li>
<li>Platform engineering teams get a single place to specify, manage, and secure developer infrastructure.</li>
<li>The enterprise removes obstacles to developer productivity and cost reductions.</li>
</ul>

<p>As you’ll see, a CDE reveals opportunities for multiple benefits. It’s often the case that a CDE feature that improves developer experience also eases the burden on the platform team and reduces costs for the enterprise. </p>


<h2>Consistency and convenience for developers</h2>

<p>A CDE aims to solve many of the developer experience problems that come from a conventional development environment that’s pushed to its limits. </p>

<p>As customers ask for more capabilities, development environments follow by growing in complexity. That complexity comes from new package dependencies, re-configuring build tools, and pulling from more repos. Developers with conventional environments are stuck with longer onboarding, longer build times, and other issues that degrade developer experience.</p>

<p>In a team using a conventional setup, there’s an irony in this: While the importance of consistency increases with complexity, the team has delegated this responsibility to each developer, which multiplies the chances of inconsistencies. A team knows this is happening when “<a href="https://coder.com/blog/it-works-on-my-machine-explained">works on my machine</a>” appears in its chat channels. </p>

<p>As we saw in the previous article, moving to a CDE decouples the development environment from the developer’s workstation. That includes relieving the developer of configuring, updating, and maintaining the environment. This gives the team a double benefit of reducing inconsistencies while saving developer time.</p>

<p>Developers only need to install and configure an IDE, and sometimes not even that, while the CDE does the rest of the installation and configuration. Technical onboarding for new hires is reduced from days to, sometimes, hours. And veteran developers can swivel-chair to other projects just as quickly. </p>

<p>At the same time, a CDE preserves the flexibility and responsiveness of a local experience. Developers may run their IDE locally, customizing their IDE and plugins for their preferences. All the IDE has to do is connect to the workspace that the CDE provides.</p>


<h2>Consolidated infrastructure</h2>

<p>With the developer happily working from their preferred front-end tools, the platform engineering team now has more control over the development environments. A CDE centralizes the specification, management, and monitoring of development environments.</p>

<h3>Templates and repeatability</h3>

<p>Documenting the components and interactions in a development environment is good practice in itself, which is what competent platform teams already do. But writing a specification for a development environment, even in conventional setups, is only half of the solution. The other half is following this specification accurately, every time.</p>

<p>Here’s one of the biggest benefits of a CDE: The platform team specifies the parts of the development environment in a CDE template. Then, instead of hoping that each developer follows the specification, it’s the CDE that follows the <a href="https://registry.coder.com/">template</a> to provision workspaces. The platform team sleeps at night knowing that each developer works from identical development environments.</p>

<h3>Flexibility for the platform team (and developers)</h3>

<p>More sophisticated CDEs are flexible enough to host anywhere. For security, budget, or performance, the platform team can choose to use the infrastructure they’re already using, from hyperscaler cloud providers to on-premise servers, or any combination they choose.</p>

<p>The template itself isn’t a rigid specification, developers can still adapt it for their needs. With template parameters, the platform team chooses how the developer customizes the workspace, but within guardrails. For example, when starting a workspace, the platform team specifies the type of GPU to provision while the developer chooses how many.</p>

<h3>Reduced support costs</h3>

<p>Developer experience is more than just tooling, it’s also support. A CDE reduces the number of support tickets typically seen from inconsistencies in projects. </p>

<p>If a developer discovers a problem in their workspace, like a missing dependency, the platform team can diagnose the problem and apply it to all workspaces just by updating the template. Most CDEs support source-controlled, versioned templates. The platform team fixes the problem only once, all developers get fixes immediately.</p>


<h2>A CDE is a lever</h2>

<p>Remember that a CDE decouples the components in a development environment. A platform team uses this capability as a lever to spend less effort for greater efficiencies:</p>

<ul>
<li>Redirect access to repos, package management, and so on, without disturbing dev workflows. </li>
<li>Organize dev infrastructure into (and administer it as) reusable components.</li>
</ul>

<p>For example, think of a legacy project that’s rarely updated. A platform team decides to migrate the project to a CDE template to get an accurate, single source of truth.</p>


<p>By encapsulating it into a template, the benefits start accruing: </p>

<ul>
<li>A manager or tech lead can assign a developer to the project knowing that there won’t be days wasted to set up their workstation.</li>
<li>The developer keeps using their preferred IDE and other tools.</li>
<li>Meanwhile, the platform team incrementally modernizes the legacy project’s template without disrupting developers.</li>
<li>The enterprise as a whole adapts more quickly to changing priorities, or just invests more time in actual development.</li>
</ul>


<h2>A CDE doesn’t sacrifice security</h2>

<p>A CDE embraces all aspects of the cloud, including security. A CDE’s flexibility gives the platform team more choices over a conventional setup for hardening a development environment with little or no impact on dev experience.</p>

<p>Most CDEs let the platform team choose how a dev environment’s components are hosted, whether in the cloud or, for more stringent security, self-hosted and air-gapped.</p>

<p>For network connections, the CDE is in the best position to ensure that interactions between the IDE and the rest of the development environment are secure, whether from a local IDE, web-based IDE, or graphical client like RDP. </p>

<p>The same goes for access control. A flexible role-based access control (RBAC) system in a CDE lets the platform team specify the projects and resources that a developer may work with. And a CDE supports the secure storage of authentication credentials for workspace components so that only the platform team can see them.</p>


<h2>Cost reductions for the enterprise</h2>

<p>The benefits of a CDE bubble up the org chart to the enterprise itself. Adopting <a href="https://coder.com/blog/the-dollars-and-cents-argument-for-cdes">a CDE has the biggest impact when the costs</a> of maintaining conventional development environments outgrows the capacities of the platform engineering team and the hardware that the developers work on. An enterprise finds itself in this position when it needs to increase spend on resources yet again just to keep pace instead of investing in future growth.</p>

<p>In a conventional development setup, the enterprise has limited budgetary options:</p>

<ul>
<li>Throw more resources at the situation with, for example, regular upgrades to newer hardware. </li>
<li>Or limit access to expensive resources like GPUs.</li>
</ul>

<p>A CDE lets the <a href="https://coder.com/ebooks-and-reports/reports/introducing-cdes-to-your-enterprise">enterprise</a> move the biggest computing and storage loads for development to the cloud. On the surface, this might seem costly. But it actually opens opportunities to reduce cloud spend:</p>

<ul>
<li>For conventional setups with expensive, remote virtual desktop virtualization (VDI), a CDE reduces costs by letting the platform team provision less expensive cloud services.</li>
<li>The biggest savings come from on-demand usage. A CDE scales up resources only when they’re needed and tears them down when demand drops. Why should the development environment keep running when the developer has finished working for the day?</li>
<li>To bring on contractors or just reduce spend on workstations, the platform team specifies a zero-config web-based IDE, typically provisioned by the CDE.</li>
</ul>


<h2>Conclusion</h2>

<p>When a developer’s laptop can’t keep up and the platform team would rather innovate than diagnose one-off problems, the conventional development environment loses its shine. A CDE solves this problem, giving developers, platform engineering teams, and the enterprise more consistency, convenience, flexibility, and control over their development infrastructure.  </p>

<p>Not sure what a CDE is? Check out <a href="https://coder.com/blog/what-is-a-cloud-development-environment">What is a Cloud Development Environment</a>. You can learn more about CDEs in the rest of this series.</p>


In the first article of this series, we introduced the cloud development environment (CDE). Now let’s get into details about a CDE’s benefits. Like any platform, these benefits start from a CDE’s use of cloud technologies to provide a service that’s consistent, scalable, and flexible.

Benefits of Cloud-Based Development Platforms

<p>A cloud development environment (CDE), sometimes called a cloud-based development environment, is a platform that provides developers with these things:</p>

<ul>
<li>Predefined <a href="https://coder.com/docs/user-guides">workspaces</a> that are decoupled from their physical workstation</li>
<li>A comprehensive and consistent set of development tooling</li>
<li>High performance remote resources to develop and build their projects on</li>
</ul>

<p>For developers, a CDE provisions environments that are ready to use and consistently reproducible. For platform engineering teams and the enterprise organization that pays for it, a CDE reduces support costs and cloud spending.</p>


What is a Cloud Development Environment? | Cloud Development Environments 101 Series

<h2>Software has changed, development hasn’t</h2>

<p>Conventional development setups worked great for decades but things have changed. A typical software project is now a mix of tooling, compute, storage, and other services that can’t practically run locally.</p>


Software has changed, development hasn’t

<p>The consequences of conventional development have become obvious:</p>

<ul>
<li>Long onboarding. To mitigate this, platform engineering teams document the procedures for installing and configuring the environment, but it’s still up to the developer to follow these steps precisely.</li>
<li>Inconsistency. Installation and configuration procedures are error-prone. Developers prefer different tooling or aren’t aware of mismatched versions. What runs error-free for one developer <a href="https://coder.com/blog/it-works-on-my-machine-explained">might not work for another</a>.</li>
<li>Expensive hardware. The developer’s workstation does a lot of the heavy lifting. Also, specialized hardware sits idle (while still running up charges) when developers aren’t at the keyboard. Or developers wait for access to resources during peaks in demand. Or to simplify support, the platform engineering team outfits each developer with the same hardware even when only a few developers need it.<br></li>
<li>Geography. Network latency affects access to centralized development resources, which affects developer experience.</li>
<li>Supportability. Expanding a project’s scope makes it difficult to maintain developer infrastructure.</li>
</ul>

<p>These problems are so common that teams accept them as the cost of doing development. </p>


<h2>The cloud is for development too</h2>

<p>Meanwhile, the cloud and distributed computing have brought on excellent declarative tools to configure and provision the applications that are being developed. These powerful, proven tools let devops teams configure an application once to create performant, consistent, scalable, cost-efficient runtime environments.</p>

<p>Why can’t developers get the same benefits for their dev environments?</p>

<p>The answer: they can! CDEs use the same principles and technologies for developers.</p>

<p>For example, a CDE can run a <a href="https://registry.coder.com/">template</a> to set up an entire development environment, with tooling and high-performance resources already configured. And when the developer has pushed their commits at the end of the day, the CDE can release the resources they’re no longer using.</p>

<p>A CDE brings modern cloud and distributed capabilities to software development itself. It’s a layer of abstraction that frees the developer from the tedium of onboarding and configuration, consolidates infrastructure for the platform engineering team, and reins in cloud and hardware spend for the organization.  </p>


The cloud is for development too

<h2>The developer’s point of view</h2>

<p>When it’s done right, a CDE automates the tedious, error-prone parts of setting up a development environment. It handles the software provisioning and access to hardware and services. All the developer has to do is click a button in their web browser to start a workspace with the tooling, packages, repos already configured and updated. </p>

<p>Modern IDEs are built for exactly this. They give a developer a responsive local experience while seamlessly connecting to cloud resources. </p>


<h2>The platform engineering team’s point of view</h2>

<p>A platform engineering team can focus on improving developer experience and productivity. The goal is to provide a single place to develop templates, administer workspace usage, and control user access.</p>

<p>A platform engineering team can use a CDE to deploy consistent developer environments, pre-build projects, and provide other improvements to development environments.</p>


<h2>The enterprise’s point of view</h2>

<p>Paying for the resources and services of an enterprise-level software project gets expensive. At Coder, we’ve seen enterprise organizations save hundreds of thousands of dollars a year just for cloud services for software development. At the same time, organizations can always meet demand for these services, even when they spike.</p>

<p>The key to solving both of these problems: A CDE spins up resources when needed and tears them down when they’re not. The enterprise pays less for hardware and services. Developers get the resources they need when they’re needed.
Equipping developers is less expensive, too. An enterprise can standardize a team on modest hardware that only needs to run an IDE. A developer can even choose to work on a large project from something as simple as a tablet.</p>

<p>Stay tuned for more content on the basics of CDEs, coming your way in the weeks ahead!</p>


In this blog, you will learn what a Cloud Development Environment (CDE) is, how it simplifies development with ready-to-use workspaces, boosts productivity, and reduces enterprise costs.


What is a Cloud Development Environment?

<p>Market leaders are defined by their innovation, agility, and data-driven decision-making. They do this with the right tools to unlock business value. In this exclusive webinar we show how Coder and Amazon Q Developer free developers from tedious tasks so they can focus on analysis and innovation.</p>

<p>Our November webinar combines the Coder cloud development platform with Amazon Q Developer, a generative AI assistant. Tim Quinlan, Senior Technical Marketing Manager at Coder, and Rymesha Fason, Technology Consultant at Amazon Web Services, demo real-world examples that free developers from tedious tasks so they can focus on analysis and innovation.</p>


<h2>What you’ll learn in this webinar</h2>

<p>Coder is a cloud-native platform for managing and monitoring cloud development environments (CDE) securely, consistently, and efficiently. We have loads of experience helping enterprise organizations improve developer experience and getting development cloud spend under control, with <a href="https://coder.com/success-stories">impressive results</a>:</p>

<ul>
<li>A platform engineering team defines a template once, then each developer creates their own development environment at the literal click of a button.</li>
<li>Technical onboarding drops from weeks to days or even hours.</li>
<li>Developers are no longer limited by the capacity of their workstation or their geographic location, but they still get a consistent, flexible, responsive developer experience.</li>
</ul>

<p>Amazon Q Developer is based on Amazon Q, a powerful generative AI chatbot that can be securely tuned to your business. Amazon Q Developer is specialized to assist developers at every stage of the software development lifecycle (SDLC):</p>

<ul>
<li><strong>Planning:</strong> Research over 200 AWS services to explore new capabilities and get recommendations based on your project’s requirements and constraints.</li>
<li><strong>Creating</strong>: Use chat in your IDE to generate code and understand your code base.</li>
<li><strong>Testing and securing</strong>: Generate unit tests, scan for vulnerabilities, and generate remediations.</li>
<li><strong>Operating</strong>: Diagnose and troubleshoot errors, analyze network and VPC connectivity, analyze AWS resource usage and billing.</li>
<li><strong>Maintain and modernize</strong>: Migrate legacy and deprecated code to newer language and library versions.</li>
</ul>

<p>Coder and Amazon Q Developer are a natural fit. They are strongly aligned on effectively applying cloud technologies to boost developer productivity and development flexibility.</p>


<h2>Is this webinar for you?</h2>

<p>This webinar is for you if you want your developers to spend more time on improving code instead of setting up development environments and wading through big codebases.  </p>

<ul>
<li>Coder provides a consolidated platform for managing development environments in the cloud. Define a template once, let developers create consistent workspaces as needed.</li>
<li>Amazon Q Developer lets developers make faster, smarter decisions when coding, testing, and maintaining software.</li>
</ul>

<h2>Learn more</h2>

<ul>
<li>Watch our webinar on demand by <a href="https://coder.com/webinars/unlock-the-power-of-advanced-ai-with-coder-and-amazon-q/register">signing up here</a>.</li>
<li>Learn how to <a href="https://coder.com/docs/install/cloud#aws">set up Coder on AWS</a>.</li>
<li>Read about <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/q/developer/">Amazon Q Developer</a>.</li>
<li>Attend <a href="https://coder.com/aws-reinvent">AWS re:Invent 2024</a>. We’re excited to meet you and talk about cloud-native development on AWS.</li>
</ul>


Market leaders are defined by their innovation, agility, and data-driven decision-making. They do this with the right tools to unlock business value. In this exclusive webinar we show how Coder and Amazon Q Developer free developers from tedious tasks so they can focus on analysis and innovation.

The Power of Advanced AI with Coder and Amazon Q Developer: Key Takeaways from our November Webinar

<p>AWS re:Invent is an in-person event for the cloud computing world. The global cloud community gets together to share and learn about AWS and cloud computing through keynotes, announcements, events, and hundreds of technical sessions. This year AWS re:Invent is December 2-6, 2024 in Las Vegas, Nevada.  </p>

<p>Coder will be there with a booth, demos, networking events, a technical session, a webinar, and we’re giving away Omega X Swatch watches. Before AWS re:Invent, we’re hosting a webinar to give you an idea of how well Coder and AWS work together. </p>

<p>We’re looking forward to meeting you, hearing about your cloud development, and showing you why we believe that Coder is the best way to deploy development environments on your AWS infrastructure.</p>


<h2>Coder is cloud-native, AWS-ready</h2>

<p>We’ve designed and built Coder to be flexible, reliable, efficient, and scalable on AWS. Saying that we “support” your Coder deployment on AWS is an understatement.</p>

<ul>
<li><a href="https://coder.com/blog/coder-well-architected-framework"><strong>Coder’s Well-Architected Framework</strong></a>: Based on <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/architecture/well-architected/">AWS Well-Architected</a>, the Coder Well-Architected Framework lays out design principles and architectural best practices for building and operating a highly reliable, efficient, and scalable Coder deployment on AWS.</li>
<li><a href="https://coder.com/docs/install/cloud/ec2"><strong>AWS EC2 Installation Guide</strong></a>: An example of how you can get up and running with a Coder proof-of-concept VM on AWS EC2 using a Coder-provided AMI.</li>
<li><a href="https://registry.coder.com/templates/aws-linux"><strong>AWS EC2 Templates</strong></a>: Coder templates for provisioning AWS EC2 VMs as Coder workspaces for seamless integration between Coder and AWS infrastructure.</li>
<li><a href="https://coder.com/docs/tutorials/gcp-to-aws"><strong>Google to AWS Federation Tutorial</strong></a>: How to use a Google Cloud service account to authenticate the Coder control plane to AWS and create an EC2 workspace.</li>
</ul>


<h2>Where to find us</h2>

<p>Meet the Coder team at Booth #320 in the AWS Marketplace Pavilion. We’re happy to answer your questions. And we’ll be demoing Coder every day to show it in action. We’re excited to show you how Coder simplifies cloud development.</p>


<h2>Learn about cloud development</h2>

<p>Come to <a href="https://registration.awsevents.com/flow/awsevents/reinvent24/public/page/catalog?trk=direct&search=DOP109-S">our technical session</a> for a discussion of how Coder accelerates cloud-native development for enterprise. Ben Potter, our VP of Product, will show you how Coder has sped up onboarding from months to hours and dropped cloud spending just as dramatically.</p>


<h2>Four chances to win an Omega X Swatch watch</h2>

<p>We have <a href="https://coder.com/aws-reinvent">4 watches to give away</a>, the Omega Bioceramic MoonSwatch, with designs inspired by the solar system. Join us at our session for a chance to win one of them. Or <a href="https://meet.coder.com/campaign/aws-re-invent-2024-onsite-meeting">schedule a time</a> to meet one-on-one for a chance to win one of the other three.</p>


watches

<h2>Mix, mingle, and party with attendees</h2>

<p>To show how much we appreciate our community, we’re <a href="https://coder.com/aws-reinvent">co-hosting</a> some social events with <a href="https://www.datadoghq.com/">Datadog</a>, <a href="https://www.gremlin.com/">Gremlin</a>, <a href="https://tailscale.com/">Tailscale</a>, <a href="https://www.hashicorp.com/">HashiCorp</a>, <a href="https://www.carahsoft.com/">Carahsoft</a>, and others. Mix and mingle with Coder and other AWS re:Invent attendees.</p>


<h2>Can’t make it? Join our webinar</h2>

<p>Or even if you can make it to AWS re:Invent, we’re hosting a live webinar on November 19, 2024. Experts on Coder and AWS will show how Coder and Amazon Q Developer give better developer productivity, predictive analytics, and personalized customer experiences. After the live webinar you can also watch it on-demand. <a href="https://coder.com/webinars/unlock-the-power-of-advanced-ai-with-coder-and-amazon-q/register">Sign up here</a>.</p>


Webinar graphic

<h2>Join us!</h2>

<p>We have a lot planned for you at AWS re:Invent 2024 and we’re excited to meet you and talk about cloud-native development. <a href="https://coder.com/aws-reinvent">Find out more</a>.</p>


Coder will be at AWS re:Invent 2024 with a booth, demos, events, a technical session, a webinar, and we’re giving away Omega X Swatch watches. We’re looking forward to meeting you, hearing about your cloud development, and showing you why Coder is the best way to deploy development environments on your AWS infrastructure.

Join Coder at ReInvent 2024

Join Coder at AWS re:Invent 2024

<p>Traditional Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) solutions hinder developer productivity and inflate infrastructure costs. In this webinar, we show a modern alternative to VDI with Coder and Island. Developers can onboard in minutes while organizations can enforce browser-level governance and reduce VDI-related costs by up to 90%.</p>

<p>Our October webinar introduces an alternative to Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) that’s tailored for developers, increasing their productivity while giving the enterprise more flexibility to manage and monitor development environments. Eric Paulsen, our Field CTO for EMEA, and Tim Deese, Sales Engineer at Island, show how to combine Coder with Island to provide a more responsive developer experience, consolidate administrative tasks, and reduce infrastructure costs.</p>


<h2>VDI is convenient, but isn’t for developers</h2>

<p>With VDI, the user works with familiar desktops while organizations leverage the cloud to host these desktops. But VDI is a generalized solution, not designed for the specific needs of developers:</p>

<ul>
<li>Laggy: Degraded developer experience and slower time-to-market.</li>
<li>Slow for everyday tasks: Mismanaged resources mean that one developer&#39;s demands degrade others&#39; experiences.</li>
<li>Compatibility conflicts: Development tools are designed for Linux, yet VDI typically runs on Windows.</li>
<li>Too restrictive: VDI policies prevent developers from customizing their own environments.</li>
<li>Expensive: VDI hosts both the dev environment and the desktop OS. VDI licensing and infrastructure are among the most expensive cloud services.</li>
</ul>

<p>While VDI was an excellent solution 10 or 15 years ago, today there are more flexible, cost-effective tools for developers. For example, VS Code can run in the browser, taking advantage of the browser’s capabilities for running responsive, full-featured applications. This opens more choices for the enterprise to host the rest of the development environment.</p>

<h2>Coder with Island is a flexible VDI alternative</h2>

<p>To take advantage of these innovations, an enterprise can combine <a href="https://coder.com/blog/the-modern-alternative-to-vdi-for-developers">Coder with Island</a>. </p>

<p>Coder is a CDE platform that provisions, manages, and monitors development environments. It natively supports a wide variety of OSs and runtime platforms. In other words, you choose the most developer-productive, cost-effective way to deliver dev environments.</p>

<p>Island is a web browser designed for the enterprise. For better user experience, it’s optimized to run applications in-browser. For organizations, Island controls security and access management.</p>

<p>Coder with Island gives the enterprise major benefits:</p>

<ul>
<li>Spin up pre-configured, ready-to-use dev environments quickly and consistently at the click of a button.</li>
<li>Manage and monitor development environments from a centralized place.</li>
<li>Provision infrastructure flexibly and efficiently to respond to both drops and spikes in demand.</li>
</ul>


<h2>Learn more</h2>

<p>The original promise of VDI doesn’t match developer expectations or the enterprise’s security requirements and budget. Replacing VDI with Coder with Island improves developer experience, avoids VDI shortcomings, and reduces infrastructure spending. </p>

<p>You can find out more about this alternative to VDI for developers by <a href="https://coder.com/webinars/revolutionizing-developer-experience-the-modern-alternative-to-vdi-with-coder-and/register">[registering here]</a>.</p>

<p>Join our upcoming webinar: <a href="https://coder.com/webinars/unlock-the-power-of-advanced-ai-with-coder-and-amazon-q/register">Unlock the Power of Advanced AI with Coder and Amazon Q</a> on November 19, 2024.</p>


Traditional Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) solutions hinder developer productivity and inflate infrastructure costs. In this webinar, we show a modern alternative to VDI with Coder and Island. Developers can onboard in minutes while organizations can enforce browser-level governance and reduce VDI-related costs by up to 90%.

The Modern VDI

The Modern Alternative to VDI: Key Takeaways from our October Webinar

<p>There’s a spectrum of security requirements for development environments. And there’s a variety of security measures to meet those requirements, from cloud repos with public package repositories to air-gapped, 100% offline setups. Coder supports these and several security measures in between.</p>

<p>Another advantage of Coder’s platform agnosticism is letting you configure your development infrastructure to meet your security requirements. You do this by using your preferred OS, runtime and orchestration platforms, cloud providers, an on-premise hardware. In our August webinar, Tim Quinlan, Coder’s Senior Technical Marketer, gives detailed advice on securing your development environments.</p>


<h2>From standard to isolated</h2>

<p>Security in dev environments can be seen as a spectrum, from low to high. The higher on the spectrum, the greater the need for protection. This spectrum helps you choose the right security measures for your developer infrastructure:</p>

<ul>
<li><strong>Standard</strong>: At one end of the spectrum, cloud-based repos and public package repositories meet the needs for environments like an open source project.</li>
<li><strong>Controlled</strong>: In the middle, where you’ll find enterprise organizations, there’s a mix of cloud and on-premise services, and other security measures like a VPN.</li>
<li><strong>Isolated</strong>: At the other end of the spectrum are the highest security requirements, used by organizations like government agencies. Their environments are air-gapped with 100% self-hosted developer infrastructure.</li>
</ul>


<h2>Setting up Coder for your security needs</h2>

<p>There are a few techniques that you can choose to implement with Coder for controlled and isolated security. Coder itself already follows industry-standard security practices. You can harden your environments even more by reducing your infrastructure’s exposure to outside services:</p>

<ul>
<li><strong>Coder control plane</strong>: Instead of using the public <a href="https://registry.terraform.io/?product_intent=terraform">Terraform</a> registry, you can fully isolate it to refer to locally-hosted providers. </li>
<li><strong>Workspaces</strong>: Coder lets a productivity team choose how a template gets container images, packages, and IDE extensions, either online or offline. </li>
<li><strong>JetBrains IDE Backend</strong>: JetBrains IDEs use the JetBrains IDE Backend. The IDE installs this backend remotely to run in the remote development environment. For offline setups, you can avoid this by “baking” JetBrains IDE Backend into the workspace.</li>
<li><strong>Envbox and Envbuilder</strong>: Developers use Coder’s <a href="https://github.com/coder/envbox">Envbox</a> to run system-level software in a non-privileged inner container hosted by a gated outer container. <a href="https://github.com/coder/envbuilder">Envbuilder</a> lets a workspace build a new inner container image which it then overlays onto the workspace’s file system. With Coder running on Kubernetes, you can use image pull secrets to let an inner container securely authenticate itself with outside services.</li>
</ul>


<h2>Learn more</h2>

<p>Coder supports a wide range of security measures for development environments, from public access to high-security air-gapped self-hosting. </p>

<p>You can find out more about securing development environments by watching the webinar. <a href="https://coder.com/webinars/high-security-cloud-dev-environments/register">Register here</a>.</p>

<p>And you can join our other webinars on cloud development environments and Coder, <a href="https://coder.com/webinars">live and on-demand</a>.</p>


There’s a spectrum of security requirements for development environments. And there’s a variety of security measures to meet those requirements, from cloud repos with public package repositories to air-gapped, 100% offline setups. Coder supports these and several security measures in between. In our August webinar, Tim Quinlan, Coder’s Senior Technical Marketer, gives detailed advice on securing your development environments.

Securing Developer Environments

Securing Developer Environments: Key takeaways from our August webinar

<p>Coder is excited to share our July webinar. Tim Quinlan, Coder’s Senior Technical Marketer, hosts a session with one of our customers, a major global financial services company. Their developer productivity leaders give the before, during, and after of adopting Coder to rein in hardware costs, improve onboarding, and speed up build times. Along with details about their Coder implementation, they talk about the importance of planning and collaboration among developers with diverse opinions.</p>


<h2>Old conventions versus today’s realities</h2>

<p>The conventional developer setup is a local workstation that potentially hosts everything from the developer tools to the testing environment. But it’s increasingly difficult to juggle dependencies, provide access to high-end hardware, and work around geographical distances. This company faced the usual challenges of supporting conventional developer environments: slow onboarding, increased build times and hardware costs, and difficulties managing diverse teams of developers.</p>


<h2>Planning for improvement</h2>

<p>A global finance company relies heavily on its technology to build its success. To reduces costs and improve developer experience, the developer productivity team included these efforts in their planning:</p>

<ul>
<li>Total cost of ownership: The cost of development infrastructure isn’t just in the hardware and platforms. Other costs need to be considered, like the support engineers who set up and administer this infrastructure.</li>
<li>Collaboration: With diverse teams of developers and their own opinions on developer infrastructure, the developer productivity team made it a point to include senior developers in the conversations about improving the development environments.</li>
</ul>


<h2>Coder consolidates while keeping things flexible</h2>

<p>The productivity team combined Coder with Kubernetes to move development environments to the cloud. This combination gives them the flexibility to balance developer and budgetary needs:</p>

<ul>
<li>Multi-regional deployment: Now developers, no matter their geographical location, can seamlessly access their environments.</li>
<li>Preconfigured environments: Onboarding is down to hours instead of days.</li>
<li>Efficient resource management: Coder and Kubernetes provision and tear down resources based on demand instead leaving them idle and unused. Hardware and platform spend dropped accordingly.</li>
</ul>


<h2>Learn more</h2>

<p>The productivity team is excited about the future with Coder, including the potential for continuous improvement. They look forward to seeing more development teams using Coder on a daily basis.</p>

<p>You can find out more about this global financial services company and dive deeper into the developer productivity team’s Coder adoption by <a href="https://coder.com/webinars/from-discovery-to-value-a-global-financial-services-company-success-story-with-co/register">registering for the full webinar here</a>. </p>

<p>Join us in the next webinar on August 27, 2024 as we explore deploying and maintaining a scalable Cloud Development Environment in a high-security data center. This webinar dives into the practical use of Coder’s self-hosted and self-maintained CDE in an air-gapped environment. <a href="https://coder.com/webinars/high-security-cloud-dev-environments/register">Register here</a>. </p>


We had a great conversation with one of our customers, a major global financial services customer, where they showcased how they controlled hardware costs, improved onboarding, and sped up build times thanks to Coder, proper planning, and collaboration.

Key Takeaways from Our July Webinar

A Global Financial Services Company Brings Value with Coder

<p>Generative AI has found a useful place in software development, the advantages are clear. But how can you effectively deploy these tools within your own development organization? Our recent webinar dives into the practical steps to implement a cost-effective solution that meets your developers&#39; AI/ML needs without overspending on GPU resources.</p>

<p>Coder on Kubernetes is a powerful combination with many advantages over conventional methods for deploying AI/ML for developers: it saves time, reduces costs, reduces security risks, and gives developers a positive, productive experience. </p>

<p>How do we know this about AI/ML in development environments? We’ve helped many medium and large developer organizations not just in the high-tech industries you’d expect, but in other vertical markets like insurance, healthcare, oil and gas, utilities, and transportation.</p>

<p>Building on insights from our May webinar on <a href="https://coder.com/blog/scaling-genai-in-software-development-key-takeaways-from-our-may-webinar">GenAI in software development</a>, Tim Quinlan, Coder’s Senior Technical Marketer, gives a technical discussion of implementing AI/ML tooling for your developers.</p>


<h2>A common AI/ML deployment method</h2>

<p>A common way to deploy AI/ML for software development is to use physical, on-prem GPUs and monolithic VMs. This setup gives quick initial gains, to be sure, but an organization also has to manage security, predictability, and hope to find sufficiently skilled human resources. And this method is resource intensive: developers often end up waiting for access to a limited pool of GPUs or the same GPUs sit idle outside of business hours.</p>


<h2>Coder on Kubernetes brings automatic scalability</h2>

<p>Coder on Kubernetes scales GPU resources automatically, so your organization pays only for what it uses. </p>

<p>Coder Enterprise’s <a href="https://coder.com/docs/admin/rbac">RBAC controls</a> give the flexibility of providing tiered workspaces to fit the project. Coder assigns appropriate GPU resources whether developers are working on GPU-intensive projects or more modest efforts.</p>


<h2>Deploying AI/ML in development environments</h2>

<p>In a demo of Coder on Kubernetes, Tim starts with Kubernetes configuration, including GPU provisioning, nodes, and taints and labels. Then he covers Coder setup, including node selection and toleration, requests and limits, and RBAC.</p>

<p>Coder uses <a href="https://coder.com/docs/templates">templates</a> to provision developer workspaces. Tim shows the template that manages all these features to automatically configure an environment that’s tailored to the developer’s needs.</p>


<h2>Learn more</h2>

<p>Coder on Kubernetes is a cost-effective way to deploy scalable AI/ML in development environments while giving good developer experience, security management, and flexibility.</p>

<p>If you want to watch the full webinar, dive deeper by <a href="https://coder.com/webinars/deploy-ai-ml-development-tooling-at-scale-with-coder/register">registering here</a>. You can also check out our repo with example <a href="https://github.com/coder/webinars/tree/main/2024/2024_06_genai_tooling">Coder templates for AI/ML deployment</a>.</p>

<p>Join our upcoming webinar: a <a href="https://coder.com/webinars/from-discovery-to-value-a-global-financial-services-company-success-story-with-co/register">large global financial services company</a> will share their Coder journey in the next webinar on June 25th, 2024.</p>


Building on insights from our May webinar on GenAI in software development, Tim Quinlan, Coder’s Senior Technical Marketer, gives a technical discussion of implementing AI/ML tooling for your developers. Check out the key takeways from the webinar. 

Deploy AI/ML Development Tooling at Scale with Coder Webinar Recap

Deploy AI/ML Development Tooling at Scale: Key Takeaways from Our June Webinar

<p>The dust is settling on generative AI’s place in software development. GenAI has measurably increased developer productivity with features like augmented code completion and documentation search. Now the challenge is to prevent the costs of running GenAI from wiping out the gains from using it. This is a challenge that we’ve seen many large organizations run into. </p>

<p>Coder’s Rob Whiteley, CEO, and Tim Quinlan, Senior Technical Marketer, hosted a webinar to show how Coder manages GenAI for developers at scale.</p>

<p>What they covered:</p>

<ul>
<li>Overview: GenAI in the industry</li>
<li>Coder’s approach: If you can deploy it, Coder can manage it</li>
<li>Demo: Deploying popular GenAI tooling</li>
<li>Architecture: autoscaling AI/ML for developers</li>
</ul>


<h2>Adopting GenAI for software development</h2>

<p>Solutions like <a href="https://github.com/features/copilot/">GitHub Copilot</a> and <a href="https://gemini.google.com/">Google Gemini</a> are boosting developer productivity to the point of significantly reducing development costs. To get the most benefit, we suggest that organizations consider a few issues when adding GenAI to their developer environments.</p>

<p>An organization should evaluate each solution’s features and capabilities. Each has their own advantages and disadvantages, so committing to a single GenAI provider could limit potential benefits.</p>

<p>And while features like code completion are straightforward, the real challenge with GenAI is governance. The goal is to deploy GenAI effectively for your developers while keeping cloud spend under control. For example, not every developer needs the boost in performance from expensive GPUs.</p>


<h2>Coder flexibility means better choices for GenAI</h2>

<p>Coder is purposely agnostic about GenAI. Like every other developer tool that Coder can manage, we let you choose the technologies that best suit your developers’ needs. </p>

<p>You can use Coder to provision GenAI for each project and scale it efficiently. Coder lowers costs, speeds up onboarding, and simplifies the integration of GenAI with other parts of the development lifecycle.</p>


<h2>Deploying GenAI with Coder</h2>

<p>In the webinar, you’ll see Tim give a live demo of deploying GitHub Copilot and Google Gemini with Coder. That includes provisioning these solutions through <a href="https://kubernetes.io/">Kubernetes</a> then automatically installing the appropriate extensions in <a href="https://code.visualstudio.com/">VS Code</a>, both native and in the browser. All the developer has to do is start a <a href="https://coder.com/docs/workspaces">workspace</a> to get coding and interacting with the AI.</p>


<h2>Coder handles autoscaling too</h2>

<p>Coder also handles smart scaling of compute resources for your GenAI solution. Cloud GPU is expensive, so using it efficiently lets you keep the benefits of GenAI. Tim shows how to autoscale with Kubernetes node groups and taints/tolerations. For even more control, he shows  how to combine that with Coder Enterprise’s <a href="https://coder.com/docs/admin/rbac">RBAC features</a>. This lets you allocate only the resources that a specific developer needs while still providing a responsive experience.</p>


<h2>Learn more</h2>

<p>We make Coder to give you control over your developers’ experience and the computing resources they need. And Coder is flexible enough to manage these things without forcing you to commit to specific platforms or technologies, including GenAI. </p>

<p>If you want to watch the full webinar, dive deeper by <a href="https://coder.com/webinars/deploy-genai-at-scale-with-coder/register">registering here</a>. You can also check out our repo with <a href="https://github.com/coder/webinars/tree/main/2024/2024_05_genai_at_scale">example Coder templates for GenAI</a>. </p>

<p>Join our upcoming webinar, &quot;<a href="https://coder.com/webinars/deploy-ai-ml-development-tooling-at-scale-with-coder/register">Deploy AI/ML Development Tooling at Scale with Coder</a>,&quot; on June 25th, 2024, to explore how Coder can enhance your AI/ML development process.</p>


In this blog, we recap the recent webinar hosted by Coder’s CEO Rob Whiteley and Senior Technical Marketer Tim Quinlan, where they discussed how Coder manages generative AI (GenAI) for developers at scale. The webinar covered the industry's current state of GenAI, Coder’s flexible approach to managing AI tools, a live demo of deploying popular GenAI solutions like GitHub Copilot and Google Gemini, and strategies for autoscaling AI/ML resources to maintain cost efficiency while enhancing developer productivity.

Scaling GenAI in Software Development

Scaling GenAI in Software Development: Key Takeaways from Our May Webinar

<p>I outgrew my little homelab. I have a couple of <a href="https://ameridroid.com/products/odroid-hc2">ODROID-HC2</a> devices in a closet for serving files and experimenting with ARM assembly. They work great but they’re small, single board computers with matching small capacity.</p>

<p>It was time to expand my homelab to handle my dev projects too.</p>

<h2>My problem: I wasn&#39;t getting anywhere</h2>

<p>I was spending too much time working around my project&#39;s obstacles instead of working on them. They&#39;re spread out over several environments and places:</p>

<ul>
<li>They run on OpenBSD, Windows, Linux, ARM, python3, browsers, and command-line tools.</li>
<li>I’m typing right now on an OpenBSD laptop. I sometimes use a Windows laptop. The ODROIDs are almost literally chained to my homelab closet.</li>
<li>I work from home, a co-work space, and sometimes other time zones.</li>
</ul>

<p>In other words, my location and the machine I use put a limit on the projects I could work on at any given time.</p>

<p>A good solution would let me self-host my projects and work on them wherever and however I want. A better solution would also let me use an iPad for the <a href="https://coder.com/blog/a-guide-to-writing-code-on-an-ipad">ultimate sofa software development rig</a>.</p>

<p>I put off fixing this because I expected to hack and contort different tools into something that might eventually approach what I wanted. The cure seemed worse than the disease.</p>

<h2>I discovered Coder</h2>

<p>It turns out that <a href="https://coder.com/docs/v2">Coder</a> is a much easier solution. Coder solves big problems for big enterprise dev teams. And I discovered that it can solve my problems:</p>

<ul>
<li>An isolated workspace for each project, no matter the environment</li>
<li>Secure, remote access</li>
<li>Flexibility of handling cloud and on-prem workspaces</li>
<li>Administering all these workspaces from a single place</li>
<li>Easy to install</li>
<li>Runs on modest hardware</li>
<li>Bonus: <a href="https://github.com/coder">Open source</a>!</li>
</ul>

<h2>First, the hardware</h2>

<p>My homelab would need more hardware. I found a used <a href="https://www.lenovo.com/il/en/desktops/thinkcentre/m-series-tiny/m92p">Lenovo m92P Tiny</a> with 16 GB RAM and upgraded its spinning disk with a 1 TB SSD, all for $200. I named it &quot;Marvin&quot;, a character from my favorite movie.</p>

<p>I installed <a href="https://www.debian.org/intro/why_debian">Debian</a> and crammed Marvin into the homelab closet. Marvin’s only connection to the outside world is an ethernet cable.</p>


<h2>Install Docker then Coder</h2>

<p>I ssh&#39;d into Marvin to get started.</p>

<p>First I installed Docker, before Coder. You&#39;ll see why in two paragraphs.</p>

<p>Instead of <a href="https://www.docker.com/products/docker-desktop/">Docker Desktop</a>, I installed <a href="https://docs.docker.com/engine/install/debian/">Docker Engine for Debian</a> because Marvin is headless. I&#39;m not missing out on Docker Desktop&#39;s GUI since Coder does a lot of Docker management for me.</p>

<p>Next was Coder. Its <a href="https://coder.com/docs/v2/latest/install/install.sh">install script</a> does the right thing. In Marvin’s case it detected Debian to install a <code>.deb</code> package. It also recognized Docker so it added the <code>coder</code> user to the <code>docker</code> group.</p>

<pre><code class="bash">marc@marvin:~$ sudo curl -fsSL https://coder.com/install.sh | sh
[sudo] password for marc:
Debian GNU/Linux 11 (bullseye)
Installing v0.18.1 of the amd64 deb package from GitHub.
# Installation progress...
deb package has been installed.
# Info for next steps, including setting up Coder as a systemd server...
marc@marvin:~$
</code></pre>

<p>I wanted to dedicate Marvin to hosting my projects, so I followed the installer&#39;s suggestion to run Coder <a href="https://coder.com/docs/v2/latest/admin/configure#system-packages">as a system service</a>:</p>

<pre><code class="bash">marc@marvin:~$ sudo systemctl enable --now coder
</code></pre>

<p>Accessing Coder is straightforward:</p>

<ul>
<li><a href="https://coder.com/docs/v2/latest/cli">Command line tool</a></li>
<li>Web user interface that I can access on my home network with Marvin&#39;s local IP address</li>
<li>Publicly accessible, encrypted tunnel based on <a href="https://coder.com/docs/v2/latest/networking">Tailscale</a></li>
<li>An <a href="https://coder.com/docs/v2/latest/api">API</a></li>
</ul>

<p>I got the <a href="https://coder.com/docs/v2/latest/admin/configure">tunnel’s access URL</a> (and checked that Coder is up and running):</p>

<pre><code class="bash">marc@marvin:~$ sudo journalctl -u coder.service -b
# Log entries from Coder
Mar 09 14:22:21 marvin coder[617]: Opening tunnel so workspaces can connect to your deployment. For production scenarios, specify an external access URL
Mar 09 14:22:22 marvin coder[617]: View the Web UI: https://marvin-access-url.pit-1.try.coder.app
# More log entries from Coder
</code></pre>

<h2>Using Coder for the first time</h2>

<p>At this point I was able to use my laptop&#39;s browser to log in to Coder. I opened a tab with the access URL and was asked to set up an account. This account is only for Marvin&#39;s instance of Coder.</p>


<p>Once logged in, I was ready to set up my first workspace. A Coder <a href="https://coder.com/docs/v2/latest/workspaces">workspace</a> is a runnable environment that a developer, well, develops in. Each developer has their own workspace (or workspaces).</p>

<p>A developer can connect to a workspace from their <a href="https://coder.com/docs/v2/latest/ides">favorite IDE</a> and dev tools. That includes browser-based <a href="https://coder.com/docs/code-server/latest">VS Code</a>, <a href="https://langserver.org/">LSP</a> servers, and local JetBrains or Emacs.</p>

<h2>Create a template</h2>

<p>Before I could start a workspace, I needed to create a <a href="https://coder.com/docs/v2/latest/templates">template</a>. A template is the collection of settings that Coder uses to create new workspaces. You only have to set up a template once to create as many workspaces as you need from it.</p>

<p>A Coder template is a <a href="https://www.terraform.io/">Terraform</a> file. That means that a Coder workspace can be whatever you can provision with Terraform. For big dev teams, that can be as sophisticated as pods in a <a href="https://coder.com/docs/v2/latest/platforms/kubernetes">Kubernetes</a> cluster.</p>

<p>Or when an ephemeral container won&#39;t do, like when a project is more &quot;pet&quot; than &quot;cattle&quot; or the project needs fuller access to the OS and hardware, a template can provision a virtual machine with <a href="https://github.com/bpmct/coder-templates/tree/main/proxmox-vm">Proxmox VE</a>. This way, the developer can treat the workspace like a full computer but still manage it like any other workspace.</p>

<p>Coder comes with a few templates out of the box. These templates include cloud computing like <a href="https://coder.com/blog/remote-developer-environments-on-fly-io">Fly.io</a>, Digital Ocean, Azure, Google Cloud, and AWS.</p>

<p>For Marvin, I&#39;d just be using Docker.</p>

<p>For my first workspace, I wanted to keep things simple with a template that would let me self-host with Docker. I selected <strong>Templates</strong> then <strong>Starter Templates</strong>.</p>


<p>In <strong>Starter Templates</strong> I selected <a href="https://github.com/coder/coder/tree/main/examples/templates/docker">Develop in Docker</a>.</p>


<p>I went back to Marvin&#39;s shell to set up my template, starting with authentication:</p>

<pre><code class="bash">marc@marvin:~$ coder login https://marvin-access-url.coder.app
Open the following in your browser:

        https://marvin-access-url.coder.app/cli-auth

&gt; Paste your token here:
&gt; Welcome to Coder, marc! You&#39;re authenticated.
</code></pre>

<p>Then I followed the instructions to create a Docker template. This template creates a directory named <code>docker</code>:</p>

<pre><code class="bash">marc@marvin:~$ coder templates init
# Follow instructions to choose Develop in Docker...
Create your template by running:

   cd ./docker &amp;&amp; coder templates create

Examples provide a starting point and are expected to be edited!
</code></pre>

<p>This starter template uses the vanilla <a href="https://hub.docker.com/_/ubuntu/">Ubuntu container image</a>. Normally at this point, I would have customized the template for a project by editing the Terraform file, <code>main.tf</code>, in the <code>docker</code> directory:</p>

<pre><code class="bash">marc@marvin:~$ ls docker
main.tf  README.md
</code></pre>

<p>Next, I followed Coder&#39;s instructions to create the template:</p>

<pre><code class="bash">marc@marvin:~$ cd ./docker &amp;&amp; coder template create
&gt; Upload &quot;~/docker&quot;? (yes/no) yes
# Progress info...
┌────────────────────────────────┐
│ Template Preview               │
├────────────────────────────────┤
│ RESOURCE                       │
├────────────────────────────────┤
│ docker_container.workspace     │
│ └─ main (linux, amd64)         │
├────────────────────────────────┤
│ docker_image.main              │
├────────────────────────────────┤
│ docker_volume.home_volume      │
└────────────────────────────────┘
&gt; Confirm create? (yes/no) yes
The docker template has been created at Mar 09 14:28:39! Developers can
provision a workspace with this template using:

   coder create --template=&quot;docker&quot; [workspace name]

marc@marvin:~/docker$
</code></pre>

<p>There! The web interface confirmed that the template was ready to go:</p>


<h2>Create a workspace</h2>

<p>I was then able to create a workspace from my first template. I selected <strong>Workspaces</strong> then <strong>Create from template</strong>:</p>


<p>I filled in details about my first workspace then started it:</p>


<p>Marvin took a couple of minutes as Coder prepared the workspace for the first time, including downloading the Docker image. After that starting the workspace would take only a few seconds.</p>

<p>That got me my first workspace, running and ready to use! I could access it in a few ways, including <a href="https://coder.com/docs/code-server/latest">code-server</a>, which lets me use VS Code in the browser.</p>


<p>Out of curiosity, I went back to Marvin&#39;s shell to confirm that Docker was running my workspace:</p>

<pre><code class="bash">marc@marvin:~/docker$ docker ps
CONTAINER ID   IMAGE                                        COMMAND                  CREATED         STATUS         PORTS     NAMES
9fed4695ac59   coder-4868739b-5bc8-421c-123f-59fd8d2581ab   &quot;sh -c &#39;#!/usr/bin/e…&quot;   7 minutes ago   Up 7 minutes             coder-marc-myfirstworkspace
</code></pre>

<h2>Where to go from here</h2>

<p>I can finally go places while my homelab hosts my projects. Coder&#39;s public access URL for Marvin lets me work wherever I want. And I can finally work on my projects however I want.</p>


<p>For the next step, I&#39;ll set up some of my projects as Coder workspaces on my homelab:</p>

<ul>
<li>Static web site generator: Create a template with <a href="https://coder.com/docs/v2/latest/templates/resource-persistence">persistence</a> and add <a href="https://getpelican.com/">Pelican</a> to the template&#39;s Docker image.</li>
<li>ARM assembly: Create a template that provisions an ODROID.</li>
</ul>


banner

Run Coder in a self-hosted homelab

Joe Previte

Software Engineer

<p>The original article was written by Joe Previte. We’ve refreshed it with new and updated links to help you set up code-server for your team.</p>

<p>In this article, we’ll explore various solutions to providing code-server for multiple users. Think of this as a high-level overview of real-world approaches to providing each of your users with their own instance of <a href="https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode">VS Code</a>. All solutions are based on real things we’ve seen from the community.</p>

<h2>From Single Player to Multiplayer</h2>

<p>When we launched <a href="https://github.com/coder/code-server">code-server</a> back in 2019, we had one goal in mind: bring <a href="https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode">VS Code</a> to the web. Since then the project has grown beyond what we could have imagined. One of those ways is providing code-server for multiple users.</p>

<p>While we’ve developed our <a href="https://github.com/coder/coder">own solution</a> to this problem, I want to explore all the solutions we’ve seen implemented by the community. The goal is to provide a holistic overview of each so you can decide which suits the needs of you and your team. </p>

<h2>Show me the code</h2>

<p>If you want to jump straight into code examples, take a look at these code-server setups for teams:</p>

<ul>
<li><a href="https://sourcegraph.com/search?q=context:global+code-server&patternType=standard&sm=1">Global search via Sourcegraph for code-server</a></li>
<li><a href="https://github.com/tobycm/code-server-instance-manager-nginx">code-server instance manager</a> + <a href="https://github.com/tobycm/nginx-code-server-router/">router</a> </li>
</ul>

<h2>Solutions for Multiplayer Mode</h2>

<p>As a reminder, code-server itself is designed for single-player mode. You get a machine, you install code-server via a package manager or the release binaries. You start it up and boom, you have your IDE in a browser. </p>

<p>This drastically reduces the number of tools needed for your dev workflow to only two:</p>

<ol>
<li>an internet connection</li>
<li>a web browser</li>
</ol>

<p>To add more users, we now need a solution. Over the years, we’ve seen many discussions come up around this problem. Let’s explore the ones that folks have shared with us and the pros and cons of each. </p>

<h2>Running Multiple code-server Instances on Different Ports</h2>

<p>This is by far the simplest approach we’ve seen used. Your team has one machine with code-server installed. For each user, you run their own instance of code-server on different ports. Here’s a diagram with more details:</p>


<h3>Pros</h3>

<ul>
<li>Only requires one machine</li>
<li>Configuration is simple</li>
</ul>

<h3>Cons</h3>

<ul>
<li>May use lots of RAM</li>
<li>Possible file conflicts if admin isn’t super careful (i.e: admin should <a href="https://github.com/coder/code-server/discussions/5761#discussioncomment-4187077">restrict user to home directory</a></li>
<li>Possible limit to number of users</li>
</ul>

<p>If you have fewer than five users, this approach may work for your team. More than that, you’re likely to run into problems.</p>

<h2>Running Multiple Docker Containers with code-server</h2>

<p>A common approach we’ve seen is to have one machine run multiple Docker containers each with their own code-server instance. We use this approach for <a href="https://dev.coder.com">dev.coder.com</a> but use <a href="https://github.com/coder/coder">Coder</a> to orchestrate it. This is similar to the previous approach except the Docker containers run in isolation. That means no file conflicts. Here’s a diagram with more details:</p>


<h3>Pros</h3>

<ul>
<li>Only requires one machine</li>
<li>Configuration is simple</li>
</ul>

<h3>Cons</h3>

<ul>
<li>May use lots of RAM</li>
<li>Possible limit to number of users</li>
</ul>

<p>Similar to the previous approach, it can work for small teams but you may run into limitations and need more machines.</p>

<h2>Running minikube with a code-server Instance on Each Container</h2>

<p>One of the less popular approaches but still worth knowing is using <a href="https://minikube.sigs.k8s.io/docs/">minikube</a> to set up a local Kubernetes cluster on your machine. Each container then has its own code-server instance. </p>

<p>This is similar to the previous approach with the exception being that it would be easier to migrate to a production Kubernetes environment (i.e. Google Kubernetes Engine) if needed.</p>

<h3>Pros</h3>

<ul>
<li>Only requires one machine</li>
<li>Configuration is simple</li>
</ul>

<h3>Cons</h3>

<ul>
<li>May use lots of RAM</li>
<li>Possible limit to number of users</li>
</ul>

<p>Similar to the previous approach, it can work for small teams but you may run into limitations and need more machines.</p>

<h2>Running Coder</h2>

<p><a href="https://github.com/coder/coder">Coder</a> is our solution to this problem: a tool that provisions remote development environments via Terraform. With this solution, you can also support multiple IDEs beyond code-server including:</p>

<ul>
<li>JetBrains</li>
<li>VS Code Remote SSH</li>
<li>JupyterLab</li>
<li>Emacs</li>
<li>Vim</li>
</ul>

<p>Coder is a flexible solution to manage all the above solutions so it’s not exactly an alternative. But it does have more features out-of-the-box and is much easier to set up. Taken from our <a href="https://coder.com/docs/coder-oss/latest/about/architecture">docs</a>, here’s a diagram with more details:</p>


<h3>Pros</h3>

<ul>
<li>Only requires one machine</li>
<li>Install a single binary</li>
<li>Extensible via Terraform</li>
<li>Includes authentication, user management, and audit logging</li>
<li>Supports other IDEs beyond code-server</li>
</ul>

<h3>Cons</h3>

<ul>
<li>Requires beginner to intermediate knowledge of Terraform</li>
</ul>

<p>There’s definitely some bias here but this is the most proven solution for providing code-server to large teams in a way that scales. It’s dogfooded, battle-tested, and used by large enterprise companies whose names you probably know. Even if you’re not sure, it’s worth exploring this route. </p>

<h2>Resources</h2>

<p>For more in-depth info on these approaches, take a look at the following resources:</p>

<ul>
<li>code-server Discussions

<ul>
<li><a href="https://github.com/coder/code-server/discussions/5761">Can I share a code-server instance for multiple, isolated users?</a></li>
<li><a href="https://github.com/coder/code-server/discussions/3420">Can you have multiple users?</a></li>
<li><a href="https://github.com/coder/code-server/discussions/2280">Multiple instances on same server?</a></li>
<li><a href="https://github.com/coder/code-server/discussions/5761">Can I share a code-server instance for multiple, isolated users?</a></li>
</ul></li>
<li><a href="https://coder.com/docs/coder-oss/latest">Coder docs</a></li>
</ul>

<h2>Summary</h2>

<p>As you can see, there are various options for running code-server with multiple users. We covered the pros and cons of each solution. It’s up to you and your team to decide which will work best for your needs.</p>

<p>If you&#39;re interested in setting up <a href="https://github.com/coder/coder">Coder</a> for your team and need help, join our <a href="https://discord.gg/coder">Discord</a>.</p>

<p>Good luck to you and your team! Happy coding!</p>


In this article, we’ll explore various solutions to using code-server with multiple users. Think of this as a high-level overview of real-world approaches to solving this problem. All solutions are based on real things we’ve seen in the community.

Photo by Billy Huynh on Unsplash

Using code-server with Multiple Users

Erik Bledsoe

Technical Writer

<h2>Update</h2>

<p><em>The original article was written by Erik Bledsoe. Here’s a summary of the updates to this article:</em></p>

<ul>
<li><em>We’ve added a section on developer-friendly keyboards you can use with your iPad</em></li>
<li><em>Textastic no longer supports Google Drive because of some recent changes in Google’s policies. Like the other native iOS apps in this article, Textastic is still among the most popular dev tools hosted on iOS.</em></li>
<li><em>JetBrains has stopped development of Projector as a standalone project. It’s now part of Gateway.</em></li>
<li><em>After Coder engineer Joe Previte had to send his MacBook in for repairs, he wrote a blog post about how he was able to continue working productively <a href="https://coder.com/blog/i-developed-on-an-ipad-for-two-weeks">using Coder on an iPad for two weeks</a>.</em></li>
</ul>

<h2>Introduction</h2>

<p>Each new release of the iPad Pro generates a slew of claims that it’s <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pReT94WMMHQ">ready to replace your laptop</a> or it <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYPkU9yFyJs">still isn’t up to the task</a>.</p>

<p>At the same time, the availability of cloud-based IDEs has reduced the need for powerful local machines by moving the compute-intensive tasks to the cloud.</p>

<p>Perhaps the iPad doesn’t need to replace your laptop; perhaps the cloud has already done so?</p>

<p>In this post, we&#39;ll take a look at the options for ditching your laptop in favor of an iPad for writing code on the go.</p>

<h2>Why Code on an iPad?</h2>

<p>So why would anyone want to code on an iPad? Convenience. They are more portable than a laptop, and the latest generation of iPad Pro easily matches the capabilities of most laptops with the M4 processor’s 9 CPU cores, 16GB RAM, and 13-inch screen.</p>

<p>Having a single device you can use to check email, watch movies in bed, and write code just makes life easier. And I’m not the only one that thinks so. Adrian Twarog, whose development and design-focused YouTube channel has over 350K subscribers. His video of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4kXuo8uOwgg">coding on an iPad for a week</a> has racked up over 1.5 million views so far.</p>


Being able to code with an iPad means you don't need to haul around a heavy laptop when traveling

<h2>Using a keyboard</h2>

<p>The iOS onscreen keyboard works well, but it consumes a significant part of the screen’s real estate. You’ll be more productive when coding with a physical keyboard. </p>

<p>iOS fully supports Bluetooth devices, so <a href="https://support.apple.com/en-ca/guide/ipad/ipad997da4cf/17.0/ipados/17.0">connecting them is straightforward</a>. Apple offers the Magic Keyboard, which doubles as a protective cover so it takes up practically no extra space in your backpack. There’s also the range of keyboard/covers from Logitech, giving you more choice, including lower prices.</p>

<p>For the more hardcore coders, you can always connect a full-sized Bluetooth keyboard. What you lose in portability, you gain in the familiarity of your favorite layout and feel. If you’re not a touch typist, or even if you are, consider getting a physical mouse, trackpad, or stylus too.</p>

<h2>The Choice: native iPad apps vs. using a cloud-based IDE</h2>

<p>There are two possibilities for writing code with an iPad. You can elect to use a native iOS app or use the iPad as a thin client to connect to an IDE running on another machine or server.</p>

<h2>Using native iPad apps for writing code</h2>

<p>Let’s get this out of the way up front — there is no native iOS app for <a href="https://code.visualstudio.com/">VS Code</a> — the most popular code editor by far. And given that iOS is incompatible with the Electron framework upon which VS Code is built it seems unlikely that there will ever be a VS Code iOS app. For some, this may be a deal-breaker for choosing to use a native app.</p>

<p>The biggest hurdle to using an iPad for coding is its lack of a runtime environment for most languages, forcing you to move your files to a server for compiling and testing.</p>

<p>That being said, there are a ton of code editors in the iOS app store, many of them fairly mediocre. Here are a few of the best, most popular ones.</p>

<h2>Textastic</h2>

<p><a href="https://www.textasticapp.com/">Textastic</a> is probably the most popular code editor for iOS, and for good reasons. It supports syntax highlighting of more than 80 programming and markup languages. Its interface is snappy and uses native iOS frameworks like Core Text. You can access files via FTP, SFTP, and WebDAV, or from Dropbox. </p>

<p>Because of <a href="https://blach.io/2024/03/28/removal-of-textastic-google-drive-client/">Google’s recent policy changes</a>, Textastic no longer supports Google Drive. But that probably doesn’t matter that much because Textastic integrates with the iOS Git client Working Copy (more below), allowing you to access projects on GitHub, GitLab, and other repositories. And it has an SSH terminal built-in to let you connect to your remote servers. For usability, Textastic has a dark mode and it <a href="https://textexpander.com/blog/textexpander-crossover-textastic-code-editor-for-mac-ipad-and-iphone">integrates with TextExpander</a> to reduce typing.</p>


Editing an ePub file with Textastic

<h2>Koder</h2>

<p>Like Textastic, <a href="https://koderapp.com/">Koder</a> has been around for over a decade. Its feature set is similar to Textastic as well, with syntax highlighting, support for FTP, SFTP, WebDAV, and Dropbox, and integration with Working Copy for Git repositories. Koder is free and that might lead you to use it instead of Textastic if you are on a super tight budget. But really the choice between the two could just come down to personal preference.</p>


Accessing files via SFTP with Koder

<h2>Pythonista</h2>

<p>While Textastic and Koder take the Swiss Army knife approach to supported languages, <a href="https://pythonista.app/">Pythonista</a>, as you might guess from the name, focuses solely upon Python. I include it here because:</p>

<ul>
<li>Python is my current language of choice</li>
<li>Pythonista is a great example of an app that integrates with the OS that it runs on.</li>
</ul>

<p>Pythonista provides a full-featured editor, includes some popular libraries like NumPy and MatPlotLib, allows you to run your scripts directly on your device, and has an integrated debugger.</p>


Pythonista gives you a full IDE for Python on your iPad

<p>One of the best things about Pythonista is its integration with iOS. Your scripts can access data from the clipboard, your contacts, reminders, and photos, as well as your device&#39;s motion sensors and geo-location data. It also supports the split-screen feature available on iOS.</p>

<p>However, you are limited to using either Python 2.7 or 3.5. Additional libraries can also be a bit of a pain to install at times.</p>

<h2>Working Copy</h2>

<p>If you are going to use your iPad and a native editor or IDE for anything more than playing around, you are going to need to install <a href="https://workingcopyapp.com/">Working Copy</a> so that you can access Git repositories. Working Copy is the standard Git client for iOS. The free version allows you to clone repositories, but if you want to <code>push</code> your commits you’ll need to purchase the paid Pro version. </p>


Working Copy brings Git to the iPad and dramatically improves the functionality of native editors that support it

<h2>Native development — not quite there</h2>

<p>With the right apps, the experience of coding on an iPad using a native editor can be very good. There are workarounds for tasks like compiling that can’t be accomplished on iOS, but they are just that, workarounds. It’s fine for a hobbyist or someone learning how to code, or even occasionally for a professional developer who needs to make a quick fix while away from their primary machine. But if you make your living writing code or just spend lots of time coding, using the native apps will be too frustrating in the long run.</p>

<p>That’s where cloud computing comes in.</p>

<h2>Using a cloud-based IDE for writing code on an iPad</h2>

<p>Cloud-based IDEs offer the developer an experience much more similar to working on their local desktop or laptop machine. If you use your iPad as a highly portable client to access your cloud-based development environments then you can use fully-featured cloud-based IDEs and skip the workarounds needed when using native iOS apps.</p>

<p>For professional developers and serious hobbyists, this is the way to go. Cloud-based IDEs are accessible from any device, whether that is the workstation you use on a daily basis or an iPad that you use on occasion. In many cases, they also provide far more compute power than is available on your iPad or even your laptop. And you have lots of options to fit your needs, whether you are working solo or as part of a team. Here are some of the best.</p>

<h2>code-server</h2>

<p>Thousands of developers use <a href="https://github.com/cdr/code-server">code-server</a> every day to run VS Code on any machine and access it through the browser. It’s an open source project maintained by the developers of Coder (more about Coder later). Depending on your needs, you can install it on an old machine you have lying around or on a beefy VM. I have it running on an older Mac Mini in my home lab, and many others have installed it on a Raspberry Pi or on a low-cost (or even free) platform like <a href="https://coder.com/blog/deploy-coder-on-railway-app">Railway</a>.</p>


<p>Once it is installed you can use your iPad (or any other machine) to connect and work just as if you were running VS Code locally. There’s even a page in the docs specifically for <a href="https://coder.com/docs/code-server/latest/ipad">accessing your code-server installation using an iPad</a>.</p>

<p>A really handy feature of code-server is that if you start it with the <code>--link</code> command you&#39;ll get TLS, authentication, and a dedicated URL for accessing your IDE out of the box — no having to mess with <a href="https://letsencrypt.org/">Let’s Encrypt</a> certificates.</p>


Starting code-server with the --link command provides you with a custom URL and sets up HTTPS and GitHub authentication

<p>It’s also amazingly snappy. Developers who have tried coding remotely with <a href="https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/how-to-use-remote-desktop-5fe128d5-8fb1-7a23-3b8a-41e636865e8c">RDP</a> or VDI are often surprised at the lack of lag when using code-server. </p>

<p>With code-server you’re limited to a single user login per installation, so it’s not well suited for teams, but if you are an individual and you use VS Code exclusively, then it may be the perfect solution. It’s free and you just need to pay for the hosting. </p>

<h2>Gateway</h2>

<p>What code-server does for VS Code, <a href="https://www.jetbrains.com/remote-development/gateway/">Gateway</a> does for the JetBrains family of IDEs, including IntelliJ, PyCharm, PhpStorm, RubyMine, and others. Gateway is from the folks at JetBrains. Install it on a machine and as part of the installation process it will ask you which IDE you want to run and it will download and install it as well.</p>


Testing a python script in the terminal while using PyCharm running through Projector

<h2>Codespaces</h2>

<p>If you are part of a team of developers, you’ll probably need to step up from code-server to something more robust. GitHub <a href="https://github.com/features/codespaces">Codespaces</a> lets you click a button on a GitHub repository to launch a workspace running VS Code with up to 32 cores, fully configured for working with that project. It’s powerful, it’s fast, and it’s iPad friendly.</p>


Visiting a repository in a browser and pressing the period key (.) was all it took to start up a Codespaces instance

<p>There are some limitations, however. Since Codespaces is tightly integrated with the GitHub interface, it can’t be used with any other repository other than GitHub. VS Code is currently the only supported IDE. Also, it is only available to organizations using GitHub Team and Enterprise plans, although individuals can use it for free for a limited number of hours/month. </p>

<h2>Coder</h2>

<p><a href="https://coder.com">Coder</a> is a cloud development management platform from the developers who created code-server. Like Codespaces, Coder provides easy one-click launch of developer workspaces. Unlike Codespaces, Coder takes an agnostic approach to the products it supports. If you can provision it, Coder probably supports it. That includes not only VS Code, but also <a href="https://coder.com/docs/v2/latest/ides">Jupyter, RStudio, IntelliJ</a>, as well as all the major Git repositories.</p>


Coder allows you access to multiple editors, even from an iPad

<h2>Conclusion</h2>

<p>It is absolutely possible to write code while using your iPad. Most people would still agree that the experience is better using a laptop, if for no other reason than for the larger screen options that usually provides. But in a pinch or for short periods of time, the experience can be quite nice.</p>

<p>For years, many developers have been waiting for the iPad hardware to improve to a point where it could be considered more than just a toy to play at coding. Ironically, just as the iPad Pro has achieved that milestone, the growing adoption of cloud-based IDEs makes the hardware you have in your hands less important than the workspace you can connect to in the cloud.</p>

<h2>Try Coder</h2>

<p>Coder offloads development from local workstations to your on-prem and public cloud infrastructure. Boost developer productivity with instant onboarding and powerful server resources. Keep code and data under control within your network. <a href="https://coder.com/docs/v2/latest/install">Install Coder on your infrastructure</a>.</p>


Using your iPad to code remotely unlocks your developer potential. From VS code to IntelliJ  & more, learn how to use your favorite IDEs on an iPad or mobile device.

A guide to writing code on an iPad

Ben Potter

VP of Product

<p><em>The original article was written by Ben Potter. We’ve updated it to cover the latest improvements to these methods for connecting to remote development servers.</em></p>

<p>Historically, using a development environment across multiple devices would mean compromises on speed, access, or device options. With VS Code however, developing from any device is much more approachable.</p>

<p><a href="https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/ssh">VS Code (Remote SSH)</a>: Use VS Code on the desktop to connect and develop on a remote machine
- <a href="https://github.com/coder/code-server">code-server</a>: UseAccess VS Code onfrom athe web browser, runs on a remote machine or run a local machine that you access remotely</p>

<p>Both of these tools have their advantages and disadvantages. For most of my projects, I develop remotely on cloud servers. With other projects, like (iOS development), I use my local machine but use tunnels to connect to it from any device.</p>

<p>Here&#39;s my workflow:</p>

<ul>
<li>I use VS Code (Remote SSH) for near-local experience</li>
<li>I use code-server to connect from unfamiliar devices (e.g Grandma’s computer) or “light” devices such as an iPad or Chromebook</li>
<li>I also use VS Code on my MacBook and open it up with <code>code-server --link</code></li>
</ul>

<h2>Installing code-server</h2>

<p><a href="https://coder.com/docs/code-server">code-server</a> is an open source project that hosts VS Code in the web browser. It can be installed on a remote server or locally (to make your local environment remote).</p>

<p>Use code-server’s install script:</p>

<pre><code class="sh"># dry run:
curl -fsSL https://code-server.dev/install.sh | sh -s -- --dry-run

# install:
curl -fsSL https://code-server.dev/install.sh | sh
</code></pre>

<p>Run as a Docker container:</p>

<pre><code class="sh"># Note: running code-server as a Docker container
# will not expose your local projects and settings.
#
# To persist any dependencies installed use a custom image,
# mount volumes, or add them to the home directory

mkdir code-server &amp;&amp; cd code-server
docker run -it --name code-server -p 127.0.0.1:8080:8080 \
  -v &quot;$PWD:/home/coder&quot; \
  -u &quot;$(id -u):$(id -g)&quot; \
  -e &quot;DOCKER_USER=$USER&quot; \
  codercom/code-server:latest
</code></pre>

<p>Other options are in our docs: <a href="https://coder.com/docs/code-server/latest/install">Installing code-server</a></p>

<h2>Syncing code-server and VS Code settings (optional)</h2>

<p>You can also configure code-server to use the same settings and extensions as VS Code.</p>

<pre><code class="sh"># on the machine/container with code-server installed:
vim $HOME/.config/code-server/config.yaml
</code></pre>

<p>Add the VS Code directories. On macOS, they are:</p>

<pre><code class="yaml"># config.yaml

user-data-dir: &quot;/Users/username/Library/Application Support/Code&quot;
extensions-dir: &quot;/Users/username/.vscode/extensions&quot;
</code></pre>

<h2>Connect to a remote server</h2>

<p>Once you have code-server and/or VS Code Remote installed, it’s time to make them accessible remotely. Normally, this would require either port forwarding, configuring firewalls, or a VPN,</p>

<h3>Option 1: code-server —link</h3>

<p>If you’ll only be connecting remotely from the web browser, you can use the <code>code-server --link</code> flag to get a public tunneled URL. Instead of authenticating with a password, you’ll be prompted to log in with GitHub. Future logins with the tunneled URL will verify your GitHub account.</p>

<p>You can also add <code>link: true</code> to code-server’s config.yaml to launch with —link by default.</p>


Secure tunnel, domain, and TLS with code-server --link

<p>Note: &#39;code-server&#39; —link will not proxy your SSH server. The next option can do this for you.</p>

<h3>Option 2: Self-host a tunnel</h3>

<p>A self-hosted tunnel exposes local services to the internet. I’ve chosen <a href="http://inlets.dev">Inlets Pro</a>, which is a self-hosted tunneling software with abstractions that makes it simple to get to my instance of code-server. Inlets is not free, so you’ll need a license for inlets Pro. Their personal plan is $25.00/month. </p>

<p>Since this is also a self-hosted solution, you’ll need a remote server and a domain name. I use <a href="https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing">DigitalOcean</a> for this, which costs me roughly $5/month.</p>

<p><a href="https://github.com/alexellis/">Alex Ellis</a>, the founder of Inlets (and OpenFaaS), and I connected and he provided some excellent support when preparing this guide. Inlets offers a lot of flexibility when it comes to self-hosting tunnels, but also has the <a href="https://github.com/inlets/inletsctl">inletsctl</a> tool to get up and running quickly!</p>

<h4>Installing inlets-pro</h4>

<p>If you already have a server, you can use the <a href="https://docs.inlets.dev/">inlets documentation</a> to install &amp; configure inlets-pro. </p>

<p>In this example, I use inletsctl to deploy an “exit” server. The inlets doc has examples for different providers that work great, just be sure to include the <a href="https://letsencrypt.org/">Let’s Encrypt</a> flags.</p>

<pre><code class="sh">inletsctl create --provider digitalocean \
 --access-token DIGITALOCEAN_ACCESS_TOKEN \
 --region nyc1 \
 --letsencrypt-domain code.bpmct.net \
 --letsencrypt-email ben@example.com \
 --letsencrypt-issuer prod
</code></pre>

<p>Be sure to replace the domain, email, and optionally the <a href="https://status.digitalocean.com/">region</a>. Also include a <a href="https://docs.digitalocean.com/reference/api/create-personal-access-token/">DigitalOcean access token</a> from your account.</p>

<p>After the server is created, inletsctl will return the server’s IP address. Add a DNS A record for your custom domain to the IP. Inlets will also give an example command on how to start a tunnel. Change the —upstream flag to the where code-server is hosted (usually 127.0.0.1:8080). Also, this is where you add your <a href="https://inlets.dev/pricing/">inlets license</a>.</p>

<pre><code class="sh">inlets-pro http client --url &quot;wss://[server IP]:8123&quot; \
  --upstream &quot;code.bpmct.net=http://127.0.0.1:8080&quot; \

Starting HTTP client. Version 0.8.6 - 18d8e239f940d8694532e332867c25f823439cc6
Licensed to: Ben Potter &lt;********&gt;
Upstream:  =&gt; http://127.0.0.1:8080
Connecting to proxy
Connection established.. OK.

# access at https://code.bpmct.net


# if you&#39;re on Linux, you can generate a systemd service file
inlets-pro http client generate=systemd
</code></pre>

<p>After that, you’ll be able to access your secure tunnel via your domain.</p>


Self-hosted inlets tunnel with code-server's authentication

<p>Tunneling a SSH server with inlets is also possible. To do this, we’ll need to log in to the exit server (the one we created with inletsctl) and run a second instance of inlets in TCP mode. We’ll also need to edit our local machine’s SSH settings so that it can listen on another port (since the exit server already uses port 22).</p>

<pre><code class="sh"># add additional local SSH port (2222)
# add a line: &quot;Port 2222&quot;
sudo vi /etc/ssh/sshd_config

# ssh into the exit server (DigitalOcean emails the root password)
ssh root@[SERVER_IP]

# run a TCP exit server as well
inlets-pro tcp server \
 --auto-tls \
 --auto-tls-san=[DOMAIN_NAME] \
 --control-port 8124 \
 --auto-tls-path=/tmp/tcp_certs/

# generate systemd service to keep TCP server running
inlets-pro tcp server --generate=systemd --auto-tls \
 --auto-tls-san=[DOMAIN_NAME] \
 --control-port 8124 \
 --auto-tls-path=/tmp/tcp_certs/

# create the service (ensure it has the proper flags)
sudo vim /etc/systemd/system/inlets-pro-tcp.service

# run the service on start, and start it up now
systemctl enable --now inlets-pro-tcp

# go back to our local machine
exit

# tunnel SSH as well
inlets-pro tcp client \
 --url &quot;wss://[DOMAIN_NAME]:8124&quot; \
 --upstream &quot;127.0.0.1&quot; \
 --ports 2222

# now you can ssh from any device into your local machine
# ssh -p 2222 code.bpmct.net
</code></pre>

<h2>Installing/enabling a SSH server</h2>

<p>If you want to access your dev environment over VS Code Remote SSH, you’ll need an SSH server running on your machine. Most operating systems have a built-in -SSH server that just has to be enabled.</p>

<ul>
<li><a href="https://support.apple.com/en-ca/guide/mac-help/mchlp1066/mac">MacOS</a></li>
<li><a href="https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administration/openssh/openssh_install_firstuse">Windows 11 and Windows Server 2022</a></li>
<li>Linux: You probably know what you’re doing for SSH :)</li>
</ul>

<h2>Looking forward</h2>

<p>It’s clear there are a lot of options when it comes to developing in the cloud. Wherever you are developing (local machine, managed service, or private datacenter), developers can have smooth workflows without compromises.</p>

<p>I’m particularly interested in how we can enable these workflows while also reducing the setup/friction associated with developing on remote servers such as provisioning, managing access keys, or setting up tunnels. Here are a few things we’re still exploring and improving at Coder:</p>

<ul>
<li>a single tunnel to a server for SSH and multiple IDEs</li>
<li>extension for tunneling ports inside code-server</li>
<li>1-click provisioning and access for dev servers</li>
<li>dev teams using <a href="https://coder.com/blog/why-cloud-development">containers for their dev environments</a> (local, remote, or hybrid)</li>
</ul>

<p>Thoughts? We’d love to hear from you. Drop us a <a href="mailto:ask@coder.com">note</a> or reach us on <a href="https://cdr.co/join-community">Slack</a>.</p>


How to connect to your VS Code Environment (local or on a cloud server) from any machine by using a remote server!

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