Matt Vollmer

Product Marketing Manager at Coder

<p>Today marks the beta release of <a href="https://coder.com/docs/ai-coder/agents">Coder Agents</a>, a new way to run AI development workflows on the self-hosted infrastructure you already control. It gives platform teams centralized control over models, prompts, MCPs, skills, and network-isolated workspaces, enabling a first-class agent workflow experience for developers.</p>

<p><img 
  src="https://www.datocms-assets.com/19109/1777897128-coder-agents_5-edited.png" 
  style="width: 100%; border-radius: 5px; margin-bottom:3px;" 
  alt="Run coding tasks in parallel"
/>
<span style="font-size:13px; font-style:italic;">Use the Coder Agents UI or API to delegate tasks to agents running on your infrastructure</span></p>

<p>Coder provides the infrastructure behind how agents run and provision workspaces on demand, so teams can standardize workflows instead of pushing that responsibility onto individual developers. At its core, Coder Agents includes a native agent that runs on your control plane, with built-in control and observability over agent behavior, going beyond what third-party agents expose and giving teams a consistent way to define and manage how work gets done.</p>

<p>Most agent tools are tightly coupled to a single provider’s ecosystem, creating deeper lock-in as workflows grow. Coder Agents separates how agents run from which models they use, giving teams the flexibility to evolve without being tied to a single agent or LLM provider.</p>

<h2>What’s in the beta release</h2>

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<p style="margin-top:0;"><span style="font-size:13px; font-style:italic;">Coder Agents is a conversational interface that developers use to collaborate with self-hosted coding agents</span></p>

<p>The beta release of Coder Agents includes the core capabilities teams need to standardize how agent workflows run across their organization.</p>

<ul>
<li>A conversational interface and API for turning ideas into executed code changes, whether in the foreground or as background tasks<br></li>
<li>Centralized controls for models, prompts, and usage, so teams can define how agents behave across environments<br></li>
<li>Extensible workflows through skills, MCP, and sub-agents, enabling agents to take on more complex, multi-step tasks</li>
</ul>

<p>These capabilities work together as part of a single system. Models and prompts can be managed centrally, while workspaces are provisioned only when execution is required. Coder Agents runs as part of the Coder control plane, so teams can adopt it without introducing another service to manage.</p>

<p>For teams that want to go beyond the UI, the Coder Agents API can trigger workflows from CI/CD pipelines, GitHub Actions, Slack, and other systems.</p>

<h2>For platform teams standardizing AI development</h2>

<p>Most teams start using AI agents the same way: individual developers experiment with different tools, each tied to a specific model or provider.</p>

<p>That works early on, but it quickly leads to fragmentation. Teams end up managing multiple agent workflows, each coupled to a different ecosystem, just to give developers access to the latest models from providers like Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Bedrock, or self-hosted endpoints.</p>

<p>Coder Agents is built for the point where teams need to move beyond that.</p>

<p><img 
  src="https://www.datocms-assets.com/19109/1777669111-provider-agnostic.jpg" 
  style="width: 100%; border-radius: 5px; margin-bottom:3px;" 
  alt="Provider agnostic"
/>
<span style="font-size:13px; font-style:italic;">Coder Agents integrates with all major AI model providers and OpenAI compatible self-hosted LLM models</span></p>

<p>Instead of standardizing on a single tool or forcing developers into a single ecosystem, Coder provides infrastructure orchestration to standardize how agent workflows run while keeping model choice flexible. Intelligence continues to come from the models, but how agents execute, how workspaces and compute are provisioned, and how behavior is controlled become consistent across the organization.</p>

<p>This is especially important in environments where control matters, including regulated industries, air-gapped deployments, and organizations that cannot rely on SaaS-based tooling.</p>

<h2>Two ways to run agents on Coder</h2>

<p>Coder Agents is a native way to run agents on your infrastructure, but it is not the only way to use agents with Coder.</p>

<p>Teams can still run <a href="https://registry.coder.com/modules?search=tag%3Aai">third-party agents</a> like Claude Code or Codex inside Coder Workspaces. This is especially useful for organizations that have already built workflows around those tools. Running them on Coder provides a safer, more controlled environment today, while giving teams a glidepath to adopt a more centralized and flexible approach to running agent workflows via Coder Agents over time.</p>

<p>The difference is how those agents are deployed. Third-party agents run inside individual workspaces while Coder Agents runs through the Coder control plane with centralized control over models, prompts, and execution.</p>

<p>Because of that, teams running third-party agents on Coder often pair them with <a href="https://coder.com/solutions/ai-governance">AI Governance</a> to manage network access, enforce policies, and improve visibility into how those agents run inside workspaces.</p>

<h2>Introductory access through September</h2>

<p>Beginning today, Coder Agents is available in beta, with introductory access that includes full Coder Agents Premium features and no usage-based limits through September.</p>

<p>This introductory period is designed to get Coder Agents into the hands of more teams so they can build on the feedback that has already shaped the product. We want people using it in real workflows, sharing what is working well, and helping guide its continued evolution. <a href="https://coder.com/chat">Join us in Discord</a> or reach out your customer success manager to let us know what’s working well for you and how we can help.</p>

<p>Coder Agents is already being used by early customers, but it is still maturing. Ahead of release, it underwent a security review, and over the coming releases, we will continue improving scalability, API flexibility, and overall performance. The Coder Agents API is functional in beta today but may evolve, including potential breaking changes, as we refine the platform. As always, we will communicate changes clearly and give teams time to adapt.</p>

<h2>A note on Coder Tasks</h2>

<p>Coder Agents is the long-term direction for orchestrating agents on Coder infrastructure, and over time, it will replace Coder Tasks. That change is not immediate. We will share the plan clearly, give customers and community members time to adapt, and provide a migration path before any deprecation takes effect. Before Tasks is removed, we will make sure customer workflows can transition to Agents with a better experience.</p>

<h2>Get started</h2>

<p>Coder Agents is available now in beta through our September release.</p>

<p><a href="https://coder.com/docs/install">Install Coder</a> to try it on infrastructure you control, <a href="https://coder.com/docs/ai-coder/agents">read the docs</a> for setup and architecture details, or talk to your customer success team if you have feedback or would like to take a deeper dive.</p>


Coder Agents introduces a new way to run AI development workflows on your own infrastructure, combining a native agent with centralized control over how agents operate, access models, and execute work. This beta release gives platform teams a consistent, flexible foundation to standardize agent workflows without locking into a single tool or provider.

Introducing Coder Agents

<p>We hear a version of this question a lot: <em>how do Cursor Self-Hosted Cloud Agents compare to Coder Agents, especially since both are described as “self-hosted”?</em></p>

<p>It’s worth saying up front that this isn’t really a Cursor-versus-Coder story. In fact, plenty of Coder customers use Coder today to <a href="https://coder.com/blog/every-cursor-needs-a-coder">safely deploy Cursor’s IDE</a> to their developers in centralized workspaces. We’re not pretending the market has to pick one company across the board.</p>

<p>The more useful point is that, when it comes to coding agents, these solutions address different environments and constraints.</p>

<p>Cursor’s Self-Hosted Cloud Agents architecture might make a lot of sense for teams that don’t have strict data residency requirements and can adopt a SaaS distribution model. <a href="https://coder.com/docs/ai-coder/agents">Coder Agents</a> is built for a different class of customer: large enterprises, regulated organizations, air-gapped deployments, and environments where teams require the option to keep source code, prompts, model traffic, and orchestration metadata within their network perimeter.</p>

<p>This post breaks down what “self-hosted” means in each case, because the phrase often implies more than it clearly defines.</p>

<h2>Where “Self-Hosted” Starts to Split</h2>

<p>AI coding agents are usually split into two layers: the execution layer, where code runs and files are edited, and the agent layer, where planning, orchestration, and model inference happen. When most people hear “self-hosted,” they don’t usually think in layers. One might reasonably assume the whole thing, agent loop and environment included, runs on infrastructure they control.</p>

<p>Cursor’s self-hosted cloud agents are a good example of why this distinction matters. With Cursor, the execution layer runs on infrastructure that the customer controls. The agent worker lives in that environment, executes commands locally, and interacts directly with the codebase. That’s a valid design choice for teams that want private execution without taking on the operational burden of running the full agent stack themselves.</p>

<p><img 
  src="https://www.datocms-assets.com/19109/1777904933-cursor-agents-arch-edited.png" 
  style="width: 100%; border-radius: 5px; margin-bottom:3px;" 
  alt="Cursor Agents Architecture"
/></p>

<p>But the agent layer still runs in Cursor’s cloud. Planning, orchestration, model routing, and the overall agent loop remain outside the customer’s environment. The worker keeps an outbound connection open to Cursor, receives instructions from Cursor’s cloud, and sends back the context needed for inference. Cursor is transparent about this: only chunks of code are sent, not the full repository. Still, those chunks leave the customer’s network.</p>

<p>That’s the nuance behind the label. Cursor customers self-host the environment where work gets done, but not the full agent system. For many teams, that tradeoff is perfectly reasonable. For others, especially those with strict perimeter, residency, or air-gap requirements, it’s a meaningful architectural difference.</p>

<h2>A Side-by-Side View</h2>

<p>Looking at the architecture more directly makes the distinction clearer:</p>

<table><thead>
<tr>
<th style="text-align: left"></th>
<th style="text-align: left"><a href="https://coder.com/docs/ai-coder/agents"><strong>Coder Agents</strong></a></th>
<th style="text-align: left"><a href="https://cursor.com/docs/cloud-agent/self-hosted-pool"><strong>Cursor Agents</strong></a></th>
</tr>
</thead><tbody>
<tr>
<td style="text-align: left"><strong>Execution environment</strong></td>
<td style="text-align: left">Customer-controlled infrastructure</td>
<td style="text-align: left">Customer-controlled infrastructure</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td style="text-align: left"><strong>Agent loop location</strong></td>
<td style="text-align: left">Customer-controlled infrastructure</td>
<td style="text-align: left">Cursor’s hosted cloud service</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td style="text-align: left"><strong>Model inference</strong></td>
<td style="text-align: left">Direct to customer-configured provider, no Coder intermediary</td>
<td style="text-align: left">Routed through Cursor</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td style="text-align: left"><strong>Agent tool execution</strong></td>
<td style="text-align: left">Customer-controlled infrastructure</td>
<td style="text-align: left">Customer-controlled infrastructure</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td style="text-align: left"><strong>Code and prompt data path</strong></td>
<td style="text-align: left">Sent only to the configured provider, or kept fully in-network with self-hosted models</td>
<td style="text-align: left">Code context is sent to Cursor for inference</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td style="text-align: left"><strong>Internet dependency</strong></td>
<td style="text-align: left">Not required for fully self-contained deployments</td>
<td style="text-align: left">Required for orchestration and inference</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td style="text-align: left"><strong>Air-gap capable</strong></td>
<td style="text-align: left">Supported with self-hosted models</td>
<td style="text-align: left">Not supported</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td style="text-align: left"><strong>Model choice and control</strong></td>
<td style="text-align: left">Customer chooses and manages providers and models</td>
<td style="text-align: left">Limited to Cursor-managed options</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td style="text-align: left"><strong>Control plane location</strong></td>
<td style="text-align: left">Customer-controlled infrastructure</td>
<td style="text-align: left">Cursor’s hosted cloud service</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td style="text-align: left"><strong>Open source</strong></td>
<td style="text-align: left"><a href="https://github.com/coder/coder">Yes</a></td>
<td style="text-align: left">No</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>

<h2>Why This Distinction Matters</h2>

<p>If your priority is getting up and running quickly with a strong developer experience, Cursor’s design might offer a practical balance. You keep execution on your VMs while offloading the complexity of agent orchestration and model management to Cursor’s hosted cloud service.</p>

<p>But for other organizations, especially in <a href="https://coder.com/use-cases/financial-services">financial services</a>, healthcare, or <a href="https://coder.com/use-cases/financial-services">government</a>, the question isn’t just where code runs. It’s where data flows, how systems are governed, and whether anything leaves the network at all.</p>

<p>If code context is sent externally for inference, it may be acceptable or a non-starter. If your system depends on a vendor’s cloud for orchestration, that may simplify things. Or it may introduce compliance challenges.</p>

<p>For the types of enterprises that come to Coder, there’s often very little flexibility here. Some operate in environments where outbound connectivity is restricted or entirely blocked. Others need guarantees that source code, model interactions, and system behavior never extend beyond their infrastructure boundary. In those cases, “self-hosted” isn’t a partial property.</p>

<h2>What Fully Self-Hosted Looks Like</h2>

<p>Coder Agents extends Coder’s fully self-hosted architecture to the entire agent system, with everything running on infrastructure you control.</p>

<p><img 
  src="https://www.datocms-assets.com/19109/1777906467-coder-agents-arch.png" 
  style="width: 100%; border-radius: 5px; margin-bottom:3px;" 
  alt="Cursor Agents Architecture"
/></p>

<p>That includes the control plane, agent loop, model routing, and execution environments. If you connect to external model providers, traffic flows directly from your infrastructure to those providers. There’s no intermediary, and if you deploy models on-prem, nothing leaves your network at all.</p>

<p>This makes fully air-gapped deployments possible. No required internet access. No dependency on an external control plane.</p>

<p>Of course, that level of control comes with tradeoffs. You take on more responsibility for managing infrastructure and model configuration. But for teams that need it, that’s not a downside. It’s the point.</p>

<h2>Choosing the Right Definition</h2>

<p>Which version of “self-hosted” is correct? Both are valid; they just solve for different constraints.</p>

<p>If you want fast adoption with limited infrastructure overhead, a partially self-hosted model like Cursor’s is an option. It’s designed for teams that don’t need strict control over where orchestration and inference happen, and prefer to get up and running quickly.</p>

<p>If you need strict control over data flow, infrastructure, and model behavior, then self-hosted needs to mean something more complete. The real question isn’t just where code runs, but where decisions are made and how much trust you’re placing in infrastructure outside your control.</p>

<p>There’s also a practical consideration for teams already using Coder. If you’re centralizing and governing development environments with Coder today, Coder Agents fits directly into your existing deployment. It runs on the same control plane, uses the same infrastructure, and doesn’t require introducing a new system or vendor into your environment. For those teams, it’s less about evaluating a new tool and more about extending a platform they already trust.</p>

<p>Self-hosted has always been a spectrum. What matters is not the label, but your company’s restrictions and concerns, because those determine how much infrastructure needs to live inside your perimeter.</p>

<p>See how Coder Agents runs on your infrastructure. Explore the <a href="https://coder.com/docs/ai-coder/agents">docs</a> to get started, or <a href="https://coder.com/demo">request a demo</a> to see it in your environment.</p>


AI coding agents split across execution and orchestration layers, and not all “self-hosted” architectures are equal. This post compares Cursor and Coder Agents to clarify where each system runs and what leaves your network.

Self-Hosted Doesn’t Always Mean What It Implies

<p>AI is labeled as the modern-day gold rush so often that the metaphor feels baked into the industry. Investors echo it. Founders rally their teams around it. And the line we hear most is the one about selling picks and shovels, meaning it’s wiser to build the tools developers rely on than to bet everything on the gold itself.</p>

<p>The bigger point is that those tools are changing. Platform teams need a safe way to distribute agents across large engineering groups quickly. Developers need a way to run agentic workloads that have outgrown the confines of the traditional IDE, and the ability to run multiple agents in parallel when a problem calls for it. Speed is a competitive advantage. </p>

<p>That’s why we’re building <a href="https://github.com/coder/mux">Mux</a> (<em>coding agent multiplexer</em> didn’t exactly roll off the tongue).</p>

<p>Mux gives them both. It lets enterprises roll out AI coding agents safely and quickly, and it gives developers a place to run agents with increased leverage and more scale than traditional tools allow.</p>

<h2>What is Mux?</h2>

<p>Mux is an open-source desktop and web application that lets developers run one or more agents in parallel, locally or on their organization’s governed infrastructure. It gives platform teams a self-hosted platform to distribute coding agents across large engineering groups. This is increasingly critical in enterprises and regulated industries where closed SaaS tools like Cursor 2.0 aren’t viable.</p>

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  <source src="https://www.datocms-assets.com/19109/1763487439-mux-ui.mp4" type="video/mp4">
</video>

<p>For developers, Mux becomes the dedicated environment for long-running testing, fast iteration, rapid prototyping, and deeper research. Instead of forcing everything through a single editor-bound agent, Mux lets developers launch multiple agents side by side and explore different approaches simultaneously. It&#39;s where they can assign several hours-long tasks to their favorite high-thinking LLM without bricking their laptops. </p>

<h2>Why do we need another IDE?</h2>

<p>We’re not building another IDE in the traditional sense. We believe there are already enough VS Code forks; developers aren’t starved for chat-infused code editors. If the code editor is the shovel – the tool developers have relied on for decades – then Mux isn’t a shovel at all. It’s the excavator.</p>

<p>Excavators didn’t eliminate shovels. They just took over the kind of work shovels were never optimized for, like processing tens of thousands of cubic yards of earth – or code – day after day. If you visit any modern mine, you’ll still find plenty of shovels. They’re just used differently than they were before mechanized excavation.</p>

<p>That’s our thesis with Mux. Mux isn’t trying to replace traditional IDEs. If developers’ screentime with their IDE fades, that’ll be a byproduct of how agentic-led development shifts with Mux, not the goal. There will always be a place for the code editor because developers still need a space to work with surgical precision.</p>

<h2>What changes with Mux?</h2>

<p>Instead of working through a sequential “prompt, wait, refine” loop, developers can work the way they think. They can branch early, send agents down multiple paths of exploration, and shift attention as their capacity allows. This also changes day-to-day work because developers waste less time copiloting single-threaded agent tasks.</p>

<p>For once, the bottleneck becomes human capacity, not the tooling.
Platform teams benefit too. Agent usage becomes standardized across the organization rather than scattered across IDEs or unsanctioned SaaS tools. Governance improves, and engineering groups get a repeatable, approved way to offload tasks to their AI agents. When coupled with Coder’s <a href="https://coder.com/docs/ai-coder/ai-bridge">AI Bridge</a> and <a href="https://coder.com/docs/ai-coder/agent-boundary">Agent Boundaries</a>, Mux provides platform engineers with a complete ecosystem that delivers unprecedented observability.</p>

<h2>Looking ahead</h2>

<p>We don’t believe the future converges on agent execution owned by someone else’s SaaS product. We believe it converges on open, local, and enterprise-governed environments where agents operate at scale and end users remain in control.</p>

<p>We’re building Mux for that world. It gives developers a place to run complex, long-running, and multi-agent tasks without fighting the constraints of an editor-bound DevEx. It gives platform teams a standardized, self-hosted way to bring agentic development to their entire organization on infrastructure they control.</p>

<p><a href="https://github.com/coder/mux">Mux is free and open source</a>. Give it a try and let us know what works, what doesn’t, and what you want to see next.</p>


A new chapter of development is emerging, one driven by agents that explore, test, and iterate alongside us. Mux is our contribution to that future: an open, scalable environment built for the way modern engineering will work.

Mux Coding UI

Picks, Shovels, IDEs, and Mux

<p>AI tools have moved from novelty to necessity. As <a href="https://coder.com/ebooks-and-reports/ebooks/ai-assisted-programming">Tom Taulli’s book <em>AI-Assisted Programming</em> from O&#39;Reilly</a> outlines, developers today are doing more than writing code. They’re collaborating with models that can scaffold applications, suggest functions, and even write documentation.</p>

<p>But success with these tools isn&#39;t automatic. It depends on how you use them, what guardrails are in place, and whether your development environment supports fast iteration with minimal risk.</p>


<h2>Where AI tools are gaining ground</h2>

<p>According to Taulli, the benefits of AI-assisted programming are not theoretical. They’re already reshaping how developers work:</p>

<ul>
<li>GitHub Copilot users completed tasks 55% faster in a Microsoft study.</li>
<li>McKinsey found that developers using AI tools cut documentation time by 50% and accelerated code refactoring.</li>
<li>Stack Overflow’s survey showed that nearly two-thirds of developers spend more than 30 minutes a day searching for help. AI can shorten that cycle dramatically.</li>
</ul>

<p>These tools help you move faster by reducing repetitive work and surfacing solutions in context. They don’t just autocomplete syntax. They help you get unstuck and maintain momentum.</p>

<p>Taulli puts it succinctly:</p>

<blockquote>
<p>“AI-assisted programming... [is] like your backstage crew, ready to pitch in with code generation at your command.”</p>
</blockquote>


AI-Assisted Programming

<h2>What to watch for</h2>

<p>The enthusiasm around AI coding assistants is justified, but tempered by real limitations.</p>

<ul>
<li>Code hallucinations still happen, sometimes with security or performance implications.</li>
<li>Legal questions around training data and licensing remain unresolved.</li>
<li>AI-generated code isn&#39;t always aligned with your team’s architectural or naming conventions.</li>
</ul>

<p>These risks mean developers need to stay engaged, not check out. Taulli warns that overreliance can lead to sloppy or insecure code, especially when suggestions are taken at face value. <strong>Veteran developers still play a crucial role in validating results and shaping how AI fits into team workflows.</strong></p>


<h2>What AI-assisted development actually needs</h2>

<p>For AI tools to support developers in a meaningful way, the environment around them matters just as much as the model. Here are a few key ingredients:</p>

<h3>1. Strong integration into the development workflow</h3>

<p>When tools are embedded in your existing workspaces, feedback loops are faster. Developers don’t need to switch tabs or copy-paste between platforms.</p>

<h3>2. Access to the right context</h3>

<p>Generic models only go so far. For AI to reflect your internal standards, it needs access to relevant APIs, internal libraries, and the structure of your codebase.</p>

<h3>3. Privacy and security by design</h3>

<p>Some organizations need to fine-tune models on internal data or restrict where code suggestions come from. That means running AI agents inside secure, configurable environments.</p>

<h3>4. Support for iteration and feedback</h3>

<p>Development isn’t linear. The most effective AI tools make it easy to refine, rephrase, and debug generated output—without slowing you down.</p>

<p>In short, development with AI requires more than a fancy prompt. It requires an ecosystem that balances speed with control, and flexibility with accountability.</p>


<h2>Try this now</h2>

<p>Want to see what AI-assisted development feels like without committing to a full tooling shift? Start here:</p>

<ul>
<li>Choose a routine task like writing test scaffolding or transforming JSON data.</li>
<li>Use an AI tool to generate a first draft.</li>
<li>Refine the output, compare it with what you would normally write, and decide what you’d keep or change.</li>
</ul>

<p>This small exercise can help you build instincts around what AI does well, and where it needs help. It’s also a great way to onboard teammates or modernize a stale codebase.</p>


<h3>The bigger picture</h3>

<p>AI is not going to replace developers anytime soon. But developers who work well with AI agents will absolutely outperform those who ignore it.</p>

<p>The role of the engineer is shifting. It’s less about typing every line and more about knowing what to ask for, when to step in, and how to shape outputs into production-ready code. The goal isn’t to do less thinking. It’s to spend more time thinking about the <em>right</em> things.</p>

<p>Taulli ends his book with a simple but powerful idea. These tools are assistants, not replacements. But if you learn how to work with them, they’ll make your work faster, clearer, and more focused.</p>


The role of the engineer is shifting. It’s less about typing every line and more about knowing what to ask for, when to step in, and how to shape outputs into production-ready code. The goal isn’t to do less thinking. It’s to spend more time thinking about the right things.

How AI-Assisted Programming Is Rewriting the Developer Playbook

<p><em>This blog post was edited December 5, 2025</em></p>

<h2>Balancing Speed with Stability</h2>

<p>When we first started formalizing our release cadence in 2024—committing to releasing on the first Tuesday of every month—it was our first step toward standardizing the upgrade experience for our customers and open-source community. Since then, we&#39;ve learned more about how different teams adopt new versions, and we recognize that not every organization moves at the same pace. That’s why we’re evolving our release process in 2025:</p>

<ul>
<li><strong>Monthly Stable and Mainline Releases</strong>: These updates will continue to be delivered on the first Tuesday of every month, just as they have through 2024. They bring the latest features and improvements, ensuring that teams who want to iterate quickly can stay ahead.</li>
<li><strong>Extended Support Releases (ESR)</strong>: These versions are released twice a year, designed for customers who prefer a more measured approach to upgrading. Each ESR version consolidates the last six months of updates and receives 12 months of support from the date of release.</li>
</ul>

<p>Coder will still continue with our regular monthly release process, in addition to publishing Extended Support Releases.</p>

<h2>Continuing Monthly Releases for Rapid Iteration</h2>

<p>Monthly mainline releases remain the best way to stay updated with Coder’s latest enhancements and fixes. These releases will continue to include new features, performance improvements, and security updates, enabling teams that want a fast feedback loop to benefit from the newest capabilities as soon as they’re available.</p>

<p>Each monthly release will first be available in the mainline channel and then move to stable the following month. This ensures:</p>

<ul>
<li>Customers can opt-in to receive the latest updates through mainline, or stay one release behind for the version to reach stable.</li>
<li>Enterprises have flexibility in choosing when to upgrade based on their internal validation and testing processes.</li>
</ul>

<p>For customers keeping pace with monthly releases, we’ll continue delivering detailed changelogs for every new release, lightweight emails with key updates, and incremental improvements through experimental, beta, and GA feature rollouts. These releases will continue to be made available on the first Tuesday of every month.</p>

<h2>Introducing Semi-Annual Extended Support Releases</h2>

<p>For customers who prefer a more predictable upgrade path, our new ESR versions will be available twice a year in July and December. ESR version support includes major bug fixes, security patches, and other critical fixes. Customers with a Premium support license will receive 12 months of support, while customers with a standard Enterprise support license will receive 6 months of support. </p>

<p>Upcoming extended support releases:</p>

<ul>
<li>July 2025 (eligible for support through July 2026)</li>
<li>December 2025 (eligible for support through December 2026)</li>
<li>July 2026 (eligible for support through July 2027)</li>
</ul>

<p><img src="https://www.datocms-assets.com/19109/1764977028-image.png" alt=""></p>

<p>ESR versions will serve as enterprise upgrade waypoints, bundling all the improvements from the prior six months into a single, well-documented release. These versions will be ideal for teams that need extended testing and validation before deploying to production.</p>

<h2>What’s Unique About Extended Support Releases?</h2>

<h3>Backporting Security and Critical Fixes</h3>

<p>One of the biggest advantages of ESR versions is the backporting of critical bug fixes and security patches. We understand that many customers want to stay on a feature release for a longer period between upgrades but still need assurance that essential fixes will be provided. ESR versions will receive:</p>

<ul>
<li>Backported security patches for continued protection from vulnerabilities.</li>
<li>Critical stability and performance fixes, particularly those affecting core product functionality.</li>
<li>Clear documentation on what has been patched so teams can plan upgrades accordingly.</li>
<li>Clear upgrade guides for moving from one ESR to the next ESR.</li>
</ul>

<h3>Community Engagement and Launch Events</h3>

<p>To ensure customers and community members are fully informed and can take advantage of these significant releases, we will more broadly promote each ESR version with formal launch events. These events will include community engagement where users can interact with Coder and other customers, live demonstrations showcasing new functionality, and direct opportunities to engage with the Coder team.</p>

<p>Customers will be able to ask questions and gain deeper insights into how each ESR version fits into their development workflows. These events provide a structured way for teams to stay informed and ensure a smooth transition to the latest ESR version.</p>

<h2>Looking Ahead</h2>

<p>This new release strategy gives customers the best of both worlds: rapid innovation for those who want it and stability for those who need it. We’re excited to introduce this change and will share more details as we approach our first ESR version in July.</p>

<p>If you have any questions about how this affects your team, reach out to your Coder customer success team or visit our documentation for more details.</p>

<h2>Frequently Asked Questions</h2>

<p><strong>Why is Coder making this change to the release process?</strong></p>

<p>We’ve learned that different customers have different needs when it comes to updates. Some teams prefer rapid innovation, while others need more stability. This new model balances both by keeping monthly releases for fast adopters and introducing an ESR version for teams that need predictability.</p>

<p><strong>What is the difference between monthly mainline and stable releases vs. extended support releases?</strong></p>

<p>Monthly mainline and stable releases deliver the latest features and improvements on the first Tuesday of every month, allowing teams to iterate quickly. ESR versions, on the other hand, consolidate six months of updates into a version that receives extended support.</p>

<p><strong>Does this mean new features will only be available every six months?</strong></p>

<p>No. New features will continue to be released every month through monthly mainline and stable releases. ESR versions are cumulative, meaning they include all features and fixes from the previous six months of monthly releases. Coder still recommends that most customers utilize our monthly releases. </p>

<p><strong>How long will Coder support each ESR version?</strong></p>

<p>Customers with a Premium support license will receive 12 months of support for each ESR version. Customers with a standard Enterprise support license will receive six months of support for each ESR version.</p>

<p><strong>What happens when an ESR version reaches the end of its support period?</strong></p>

<p>Once an ESR version reaches its end-of-support window, customers will need to upgrade to a newer ESR version or transition to the latest monthly mainline or stable release to receive continued support.</p>

<p><strong>Will security patches and critical fixes be backported to ESR versions?</strong></p>

<p>Yes, ESR versions will receive backported security updates and critical bug fixes to ensure continued stability and security for the duration of their support window. </p>

<p><strong>How do I know if my organization should adopt monthly mainline or stable releases or ESR version?</strong></p>

<p>ESR versions consolidate six months of changes into a single release. This means fewer upgrades overall, but each one is larger and may require more planning and effort. ESR is a good fit only for organizations that would rather absorb one bigger upgrade twice a year instead of smaller monthly updates.</p>

<p><strong>Can I switch between monthly mainline or stable releases and ESR versions?</strong></p>

<p>Yes, customers can transition from monthly mainline or stable releases to an ESR version at any time. However, once on an ESR version, customers should stay on the ESR track until the next ESR version becomes available.</p>

<p><strong>How long should I test a new Coder version before deploying it to my production infrastructure?</strong></p>

<p>The recommended testing period depends on your organization’s risk tolerance and deployment processes. However, if your organization requires a month or more to validate a new version release, then semi-annual ESR versions might be the best upgrade path.</p>


Coder is introducing Extended Support Releases (ESR) in 2025 to give customers a more stable, long-term upgrade path—alongside continued monthly innovation releases. This update outlines how ESR versions work, who they’re for, and what teams can expect in terms of support, stability, and release cadence.

Introducing Extended Support Releases for Coder

<p>From the start, Coder was built to give enterprises secure, governed, and scalable development environments for their developers. Not as an afterthought, not as a layer on top, but as the foundation for how modern software should be crafted in large organizations.</p>

<p>If you’re an enterprise exploring how to roll out AI agents to your teams, this is the part that matters most: <strong>without a platform like Coder to distribute, govern, and control those environments, AI agents don’t provide a material advantage.</strong> In fact, it could introduce severe risks. It’s one thing to be excited about what AI can do, but if you can’t give agents a place to work safely, securely, and at scale, they’re not going to deliver results.</p>

<p>We’re not the only ones thinking this way. As <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/posts/brendanhumphreys_no-you-wont-be-vibe-coding-your-way-to-activity-7305080254417547264-qidy">Brendan Humphreys</a>, Canva’s Chief Technology Officer, recently put it, “Engineers need to guide, assess, correct, and ultimately own the output [of AI tools] as if they had written every line themselves.” We couldn’t agree more. Without strong environments that keep AI work contained and controlled, companies risk trading short-term wins for long-term pain in the form of security risks, technical debt, and unmaintainable code.</p>

<p>So if your first thought is, “AI agents committing to production codebases sounds risky and expensive,” you’re right, it is. Unless you have a way to contain and control what the agent can access, what commands it can run, and where it writes and tests code. That’s exactly what Coder already does for developers, and now, the same applies to AI.</p>

<p>We’ve been curious, too. So we ran real experiments to see what agentic AI like <a href="https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code">Claude Code</a> could actually accomplish when working on real engineering problems in real environments. Not just another “AI wrote a to-do app” story, but actual issues and pull requests from our open-source repo.</p>

<h2>Why Coder Workspaces Are Perfect for Agentic AI</h2>

<p>Think about how you treat a junior developer on day one. You don’t give them keys to prod and say good luck. You give them a sandbox to work in — a real environment with the right tools, but isolated so if they break something, it doesn’t take down the business. Coder gives AI that same experience. And just like any developer, when AI has the right tools and clear context, it can contribute in meaningful ways.</p>

<p>Our workspaces are built to be fully isolated, self-contained spaces where work gets done. If something goes wrong, the workspace can be blown away and rebuilt in minutes. A<strong>I can experiment, fail, try again, and get closer to a useful result without putting your SDLC at risk.</strong></p>

<p>Imagine a future where agents are running dozens to hundreds of tiny experiments on your codebase to improve performance, reliability, and even functionality.</p>

<h3>The Guardrails You Need for AI to Work</h3>

<p>Enterprise teams need guardrails to ensure AI doesn’t create chaos in a vacuum. Coder supports role-based access controls so you can govern exactly what a workspace (and by extension, an AI agent) can touch. Secrets management ensures sensitive credentials aren’t leaked when AI starts poking around. Resource quotas keep AI from running wild and burning through cloud resources and tokens.</p>

<p>And because every workspace is fully reproducible, you can audit exactly what was done, by whom, or in this case, by what. These are not features we added for AI. They’ve always been part of Coder because this is how enterprise development needs to work. AI just fits into that model.</p>

<h3>Right-Sizing AI Workspaces</h3>

<p>But governance is only half the story. Another big hurdle is spinning up secure, consistent environments for every AI agent without crushing your infra team under a pile of custom requests. With Coder, that happens almost instantly. You can provision infrastructure-as-code to your cloud, on-prem, or even air-gapped environments with zero extra effort from infrastructure teams.</p>

<p>And AI agents don’t all need the same horsepower. One overlooked challenge of running AI agents at scale is figuring out how much compute to give them. You don’t want to spin up massive, expensive VMs for every task just because an agent might need it. With Coder, you can tailor your agents’ infrastructure depending on their tasks. Some agents might need more memory but fewer cores, or vice versa. And because Coder uses infrastructure-as-code, you can define these patterns and stay in control as AI models and usage change.</p>

<p>So when people ask us how to let agentic AI write and test code safely, our answer is simple. Give it a Coder workspace. Let it go wild inside walls that keep the rest of your world safe.</p>

<h2>The Experiment: Giving Claude Code Real Development Tasks and Coder Workspaces</h2>

<p>We didn’t want to write another post full of “AI wrote a to-do app” stories. So, we decided to put Anthropic’s research preview of Claude Code to work on our own open-source product. We took real GitHub issues and pull requests — the same ones our engineering team and community work on — and asked Claude Code to solve them inside Coder environments. No artificial constraints. No hand-waving. Just real engineering problems.</p>

<p>Our goal wasn’t to see if AI could hit a 100 percent success rate. That’s not the point. Even if AI gets 30 or 50 percent of the way there but does it in a fraction of the time it would take a human, that’s progress. And we fully expect these models to improve rapidly, so today’s partial success could be tomorrow’s solved task. Success here isn’t binary, and it’s shaped by more than just the AI model itself. Things like how you frame the task, the quality of the repo, the availability of tests, and the codebase structure all influence the outcome.</p>

<p>One unexpected but valuable side effect of working with agentic AI is that it forces us to be better product managers. AI can’t rely on institutional knowledge like our engineers sometimes do, which means we have to get sharper at clearly defining the problem and the outcome we’re looking for. It’s a forcing function that makes us pause and think about what we’re actually trying to solve, and how to communicate that in a way that anyone (or anything) could pick up and work on. In a way, working with AI is helping us level up our own skills as engineers, product managers, and collaborators.</p>

<p>What we saw was a mixed bag, but a promising one. Sometimes AI crushed a task. Sometimes it flailed. But we learned a lot about where it shines, where it stumbles, and how teams can start working with it productively.</p>

<h2>Three Real Tasks We Gave Agentic AI — and What We Learned</h2>

<p>If you want to go deep on specific tasks we gave to agentic AI, we’ve published a separate post that breaks down every task, outcome, and lesson learned. You can <a href="https://www.coder.com/blog/coding-with-claude-code">check that out here</a> — but for now, here’s a quick look at a few examples that give a sense of what we saw.</p>

<ol>
<li>First, we asked Claude Code to implement <strong>a new feature in an internal admin dashboard</strong> to sort GitHub issues by creation and update time. Without much prompting, it found the right files, added a toggle for sort order, and implemented the logic. After a quick human review and one minor fix (it had flipped ascending and descending), it was ready to go and even fixed an unrelated bug in the process. The result was 114 lines added, 28 removed, for under $5 and about 45 minutes total.</li>
<li>Next, we gave it a harder problem: <strong>removing a network extension from macOS in Swift</strong> while dealing with Apple’s undocumented APIs. After a lot of back-and-forth, Claude produced code that compiled and worked, which was impressive but still more of a proof-of-concept than production ready. The total cost was around $10 and it took about 90 minutes combined.</li>
<li>Finally, we asked Claude to tackle <strong>a backend bug in Go by fixing a Docker port mapping issue</strong> in one of our API endpoints. It made partial progress but needed a lot of nudging, especially to write and run tests. In the end, it didn’t fully solve the problem, but it got partway there. The total cost was $2.65 and about an hour of effort.</li>
</ol>

<p>The pattern is clear: AI is great at scoped, well-defined tasks, especially when there are tests to guide it. It struggles when the problem requires real-world context, deep reasoning, or a nuanced understanding of how different parts of a system fit together.</p>

<p>It also gave us a real sense of the ROI of using AI agents in actual development work. Running these experiments was not just about seeing if AI could do the job, but also about understanding what it would cost to automate that work. Now we have a baseline to evaluate whether agentic AI makes sense for certain tasks. As these models improve and hopefully get cheaper over time, tracking cost will be just as important as tracking their accuracy and output.</p>

<h2>Thoughts on Developer Productivity</h2>

<p>We should address something that often gets lost in conversations about AI and developer productivity.</p>

<p>Most developers don’t want to measure their productivity by how many backlog tickets they close or how many lines of code they write. And they definitely don’t want to spend their days supervising fleets of AI agents working through tasks like factory cogs. Developers want to build things that matter. They want to solve real problems, tackle complex challenges, and have the space to think deeply and create.</p>

<p>So while we’re optimistic about the potential of AI agents to take on routine, repetitive work, we also believe that productivity isn’t just about output. It’s about giving developers the space to focus on what they do best — thinking, designing, and building things that are meaningful.</p>

<p>If an AI agent can automate the tasks developers don’t want to do, like annoying bug fixes, light refactors, and never-ending test coverage, that’s a win. But like anything, it requires balance. Not every developer wants to spend their day monitoring agents. Some will be excited about the idea of orchestrating dozens of agents working in parallel. Others will prefer to focus on a single hard problem and stay in flow for hours without distraction.</p>

<p>The future of AI in software development needs to make room for both. It should amplify developers strengths and give them leverage, not just add new overhead to manage.</p>

<h2>What’s Next: Scaling Agentic AI for Development</h2>

<p>The way we see it, this isn’t a fad. Within the next year, engineering teams will be managing dozens, maybe hundreds, of development environments running agentic AI to tackle routine engineering work. But that’s only going to be safe and productive if companies have the right platform to manage those environments. That’s why we believe Coder’s workspaces are so well suited to this future — not because we built them for AI, but because we built them for real, modern, enterprise development with all the governance and oversight required to safely operate within an organization&#39;s requirements.</p>

<p>We fully expect that AI will require different interfaces, controls, and ways of working than human developers. But even in its current state, Coder is already well-suited to support agentic AI in secure, isolated workspaces. Much of what’s on our roadmap — from API-driven events to workspace governance, pre-builds, resource management, and developer tooling — naturally moves us closer to a world where teams can manage both AI agents and humans side by side. We see Coder as the foundation for that future, giving organizations a way to govern, observe, and scale development work, no matter who’s doing it.</p>

<h2>You Can Do This Today</h2>

<p>One final point. This isn’t some distant vision of what Coder could do. You can do this today. You can spin up a Coder environment (<a href="https://github.com/coder/coder">free and open source</a>), give an agentic AI a terminal, and let it work. You’ll need to guide it, supervise it, and know when to step in, but it’s possible right now. And we think teams that start experimenting with this today will be way ahead of the curve as AI capabilities keep improving.</p>

<p>If you’re not already thinking about how agentic AI fits into your engineering org safely, securely, and scalably, it might be time to start. Coder is ready for that world because we were always built for it.</p>

<p>If you’re curious, give it a shot. Try running Claude Code or another agent inside a Coder environment and see what happens. And if you do, <a href="https://coder.com/chat">tell us what worked and what didn’t</a>. We’re figuring this out, too, and the more real-world data we all have, the better.</p>


This blog post explores why AI agents won’t deliver real value in enterprises without a secure, governed way to manage and control where they work — and why Coder provides that foundation.

Agentic AI Meets Coder

<p>If you’re using VDI solutions like Citrix or VMware, 2025 is shaping up to be a year of reckoning. The renewal prices some enterprises are seeing are utterly astonishing, and for many, it’s driving them to explore alternatives they might not have considered otherwise.</p>

<p>Let’s address the obvious: yes, we offer a <a href="https://coder.com/blog/the-modern-alternative-to-vdi-for-developers">modern alternative to VDI for developers</a>. And no, it’s not lost on us that this could land as a self-serving blog post. But let’s be clear—this isn’t about stirring up fear, uncertainty, or doubt. In fact, this is about proactively avoiding it.</p>

<p>This is a candid observation of what we’ve seen in the VDI landscape, particularly as we’ve worked with enterprises—highly regulated ones—in North America, Europe, and Asia. These organizations, many Global 2000 giants, face significant headwinds with VDI.</p>

<p>It’s not just the usual complaints about usability, administration, or management overhead. It’s the astronomical costs—escalating at rates so extreme they make you wonder if the decimal point was misplaced…twice.</p>

<h2>What’s Happening With VDI Costs?</h2>

<p>Recently, Citrix, one of the largest VDI providers, was acquired by Cloud Software Group. VMware faced a similar fate a year prior when they were acquired by Broadcom. It’s no secret that companies acquired by Cloud Software Group and Broadcom <a href="https://www.crn.com/news/cloud/2025/citrix-parent-cloud-software-group-confirms-layoffs">rarely thrive</a> after these acquisitions.</p>

<p>It’s a common play for big, legacy tech companies to pump their prices to offensive levels as they approach their twilight years. What is there to lose? And, when you look at the recent behaviors of major VDI providers alongside their acquisitions, you can draw your own conclusions about their long-term intentions.</p>

<p>Recent anecdotal feedback from our customers and prospects proves that Citrix has been increasing licensing costs—sometimes by 50% or more—with as little as 90 days’ notice before renewal. That might seem mild compared to VMware customers, some of whom have faced price hikes reaching <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/vmware/comments/1birhg2/vmwarebroadcom_raising_prices_over_1000_to/">thousands of percent</a>.</p>

<p>For large enterprises with tens or even hundreds of thousands of VDI users, such short notice leaves little time to evaluate alternatives, negotiate terms, or avoid major disruptions. Just over a year ago, <a href="https://www.forrester.com/blogs/predictions-2024-technology-infrastructure/">Forrester projected that more than 20%</a> of VMware’s VDI customers would seek alternatives. Based on what we’ve seen, that’s a good start.</p>

<h2>What the Data Tells Us</h2>

<p>Interestingly, this pattern aligns with findings in our recent <a href="https://coder.com/ebooks-and-reports/reports/state-of-development-environments-2025">State of Development Environments Report</a>. Of the enterprises still planning to standardize their development environments using VDI, 63% plan to implement it within the next one to two years. However, when you narrow that window to within 0–6 months of implementation, that percentage drops to less than 50%.</p>

<p><img src="https://www.datocms-assets.com/19109/1737752358-vdi-data-viz.png" style="max-width:100%; margin: 15px 0;" /></p>

<p>Why the shift? It suggests that as organizations get closer to implementation, they uncover the pitfalls and drawbacks of VDI—including rising costs, performance issues, and administrative challenges—and ultimately decide against it.</p>

<p>For companies still weighing their options, this underscores the importance of thoroughly evaluating VDI not just in theory but in practice. A small pilot with a select group of developers could save a big headache. Many enterprises discover too late that VDI isn’t the right fit for their developers, and by then, the window to act has closed.</p>

<h2>Why This Matters for Enterprises</h2>

<p>This isn’t just about the major VDI providers or their inflated fees. It’s about understanding the broader risks of relying on legacy VDI solutions in a rapidly changing landscape:</p>

<ul>
<li>Unpredictable costs - Enterprises are blindsided by <a href="https://www.ciodive.com/news/broadcom-vmware-acquistion-vcf-private-cloud/733800/">sudden price hikes</a>, leaving them little time to evaluate alternatives (no doubt, by design).</li>
<li>Viability concerns - The extreme and widespread actions of big VDI providers raise questions about the long-term intentions for a technology that’s over 20 years old.</li>
<li>Performance limitations - Legacy VDI fails to meet the <a href="https://coder.com/blog/the-modern-alternative-to-vdi-for-developers">requirements of modern developers</a>, with issues like latency, compatibility challenges, and resource inefficiencies impeding productivity.</li>
</ul>

<p>The consequences of these problems aren’t hypothetical.</p>

<p>One of our customers—a massive Wall Street financial institution with a reputation for caution and long decision cycles—received their 2024 end-of-year renewal quote from their VDI provider in September. The price increase was so unbelievable that, by the start of 2025, they had completely overhauled their stack. They ripped and replaced their virtual desktop infrastructure with Kubernetes and built a brand-new development platform.</p>

<p>For an organization of their size, this kind of rip-and-replace decision, executed on such a tight timeline, is practically unheard of. It speaks volumes about just how unsustainable VDI pricing has become for even the most established enterprises.</p>

<h2>Don’t Find Out the Hard Way</h2>

<p>Pay close attention to the terms of your contracts. Don’t wait until the last minute to evaluate alternatives. In fact, if you haven’t renewed recently, now might be a great time to drop your rep a line and proactively find out what’s in store for your VDI costs through 2026 and beyond.</p>

<p>We’ve seen enterprises pivot to modern solutions like cloud development environments that offer a better developer experience and lower total cost of ownership without sacrificing the time-tested security and governance of VDI. But making the switch requires planning, and planning takes time.</p>

<h2>Work Ahead</h2>

<p>VDI has become an institution in many enterprise settings. However, if you’re currently using VDI at scale, think critically about the long-term implications. The rising costs, management overhead, and performance issues that come with VDI are becoming harder to ignore.</p>

<p>The best thing you can do is stay informed and start exploring your options early. Whether that means sticking with VDI, transitioning to a modern CDE, or finding a hybrid approach, the key is to avoid being caught flat-footed.</p>

<p>If you’d like to learn more about modern alternatives to VDI—or just want to share your experiences—<a href="https://coder.com/contact/sales">we’re here to chat</a>.</p>


This blog unpacks the rising costs and challenges of legacy VDI solutions, showing how unsustainable pricing is driving enterprises to explore modern alternatives.

A Year of Reckoning for Virtually (Unaffordable) Desktop Infrastructure

<h2>Summary: Why Large Banks Choose Coder</h2>

<ul>
<li>Development environments run on <strong>any cloud or air-gapped infrastructure</strong>, ensuring flexibility and compliance with regulations like GDPR and DORA.</li>
<li>New hires access secure, cloud-based environments in minutes, <strong>reducing onboarding times</strong> from weeks to same-day readiness.</li>
<li>Workspace proxies and advanced scaling capabilities minimize latency, enabling <strong>globally distributed teams</strong> to work efficiently.</li>
<li>Teams can use their <strong>preferred tools</strong>, like JupyterLab Notebook, thanks to Coder’s IDE and language-agnostic platform.</li>
<li>Compute-heavy tasks, such as ML training, are offloaded to <strong>powerful cloud resources</strong> and GPUs, overcoming the limitations of local laptops.</li>
</ul>

<p style="border-bottom:1px solid #FFF; margin: 29px 0;"></p>

<p>Our <a href="https://coder.com/ebooks-and-reports/reports/state-of-development-environments-2025">2025 State of Development Environments</a> research revealed that fewer than 15% of financial services institutions rate highly in governance, developer experience, and speed. Balancing security with a positive developer experience remains a persistent challenge.</p>

<p>Financial institutions must protect sensitive data and comply with regulations like GDPR and DORA, while also empowering developers to innovate safely. Securing development environments is critical, but so is retaining top talent—a lesson Coder’s VP of Enterprise Architecture, Eric Ledyard, knows well. Reflecting on his time as SVP at a major bank, he shared: “When I joined, we had over 40% attrition among new developers before they wrote a line of code because it took 12 weeks to get them onboarded. High-caliber talent didn’t want to wait that long.”</p>

<p>Coder addresses these challenges by providing cloud development environments that strengthen security and improve productivity. With environments hosted on infrastructure organizations control—whether in the cloud or fully air-gapped on-premises—financial institutions minimize risk while enabling teams to work securely and efficiently in a highly regulated, fast-paced industry.</p>

<h2>Real-World Success: How Financial Institutions Benefit from Coder</h2>

<h3>Quickly Onboarding Developers to Secure Development Environments</h3>

<p><strong>Challenge</strong></p>

<p>A major U.S.-based investment firm struggled with efficiently onboarding developers to new projects. Setting up local development environments often took weeks, delaying projects and inflating operating costs due to the need for high-powered laptops. Developers were also hesitant to give up the control and familiarity of their local environments, making it difficult to standardize environments across teams.</p>

<p><strong>Solution</strong></p>

<p>Coder improved onboarding by delivering cloud-based workspaces that new hires could access in minutes, not weeks. These environments are automatically provisioned as code using Terraform templates created by the platform engineering team, ensuring they are secure, consistent, and tailored to the developers’ needs.</p>

<p>Coder allows developers to keep using their preferred tools, like VS Code and JupyterLab Notebook, but within an environment that includes configuration guardrails for how infrastructure is provisioned, and source code is managed. This balance between freedom and security made Coder an appealing solution for teams.</p>

<p><strong>Results</strong></p>

<ul>
<li>Onboarding times were reduced from weeks to same-day, with new developers ready to contribute code on their first day.</li>
<li>Switching between projects now takes minutes instead of hours.</li>
<li>Developers benefit from familiar tools and the benefits of standardized environments, namely less time wasted troubleshooting dependency conflicts and traversing approval queues.</li>
</ul>

<p>For more details on this firm’s success, check out their <a href="https://coder.com/success-stories/global-investment-firm">case study</a> and <a href="https://coder.com/webinars/from-discovery-to-value-a-global-financial-services-company-success-story-with-co/register">webinar recording</a> with Coder, available on-demand.</p>

<h3>Adapting to Rapidly-Changing Market Conditions</h3>

<p><strong>Challenge</strong></p>

<p>Another top 10 investment firm faced delays in collaboration between their quantitative analysts and floor traders. Analysts built predictive models, but traders often waited hours—or even days—to test them due to slow pipelines. This lag made it difficult for teams to respond quickly to market changes.</p>

<p><strong>Solution</strong></p>

<p>Using Coder, the firm deployed cloud development environments that allowed quants and traders to access and interact with the same models in real-time. Coder’s port-sharing capabilities enabled direct access to models without relying on time-consuming pipelines. Its IDE-agnostic approach supported familiar tools and languages, allowing teams to work together effectively.</p>

<p><strong>Results</strong></p>

<ul>
<li>Traders tested strategies as analysts built them, responding quickly to market changes.</li>
<li>Feedback loops were dramatically shortened, providing a clear advantage during critical trading windows.</li>
<li>Both teams benefited from real-time collaboration, improving overall efficiency and adaptability.</li>
</ul>

<h2>Key Features of Coder for Financial Institutions</h2>

<p>Coder’s platform is designed to help financial institutions meet strict regulatory requirements while providing the flexibility they need to drive innovation. These features make Coder a strong choice for organizations in regulated industries:</p>

<ul>
<li><strong>Air-Gapped Deployment Options</strong> - In addition to running any major cloud provider, Coder also supports fully <a href="https://coder.com/docs/install/offline">air-gapped deployments</a>, allowing institutions to operate in completely isolated infrastructure when necessary. This option is particularly valuable for organizations with the highest data sovereignty requirements.</li>
<li><strong>Support for Compute-Intensive Workloads</strong> - ML engineers and data scientists can offload tasks like model training to cloud GPUs, bypassing the limitations of local hardware while maintaining access to familiar tools like JupyterLab Notebook.</li>
<li><strong>Global Scalability and Performance</strong> - Coder ensures fast, responsive environments for distributed teams with features like <a href="https://coder.com/docs/admin/networking/workspace-proxies">workspace proxies</a>, reducing latency by hosting workspaces close to developers. This makes it easy to support teams across many regions without sacrificing performance or security.</li>
<li><strong>Customizable Workspace Templates</strong> - Administrators can standardize workspaces <a href="https://coder.com/docs/admin/templates">using Terraform</a> to define tools, configurations, and security policies. This ensures compliance with internal standards and regulatory frameworks while maintaining flexibility for teams.</li>
<li><strong>Enterprise Integrations</strong> - Coder integrates with <a href="https://coder.com/docs/admin/integrations">key enterprise systems</a>, such as Active Directory for authentication and Prometheus for monitoring. These integrations simplify operations while ensuring alignment with existing compliance frameworks.</li>
<li><strong>Audit Logging and Activity Monitoring</strong> - With <a href="https://coder.com/docs/admin/security/audit-logs">detailed audit logs</a> and command tracking, administrators have full visibility into user activity. This enables compliance with regulations like GDPR and DORA by providing the documentation required for audits and incident response.</li>
<li><strong>Modern Alternative to Legacy VDI</strong> - By centralizing secure, high-performance cloud environments, Coder eliminates the management overhead, high costs, and <a href="https://coder.com/blog/the-modern-alternative-to-vdi-for-developers">poor developer experience of VDI</a> so that teams can work more efficiently with the tools they prefer.</li>
</ul>

<p>For a deeper dive into Coder’s capabilities and how it stacks up against other providers in the cloud development environment space, check out our latest <a href="https://coder.com/ebooks-and-reports/ebooks/an-enterprise-buyer-s-guide-to-cloud-development-environments">Enterprise Buyer’s Guide to CDEs</a>.</p>

<h2>The Foundation for Secure and Compliant Innovation</h2>

<p>For financial institutions, balancing security with developer productivity is essential.</p>

<p>From reducing delays to ensuring compliance, Coder replaces decentralized local development environments with secure, scalable cloud environments. It’s not just part of the solution—it’s the foundation for secure, compliant, and future-ready development.</p>

<p>Do you want to hear more about how other regulated companies secure their development environments with Coder? <a href="https://coder.com/demo">Contact us for a demo today</a>.</p>


Read how Coder helps financial institutions keep their development environments secure while giving developers the freedom to work faster. Find out why some of the biggest banks rely on Coder to onboard new hires quickly, improve collaboration, and stay compliant.

Coder Supports Financial Institutions in Secure, Compliant Development

<h2>Summary: Why Government Agencies Choose Coder</h2>

<ul>
<li><strong>Fully self-hosted</strong>, keeping data and environments within controlled infrastructure. <strong>Open-source</strong> for easy vulnerability scanning and transparency.</li>
<li>Runs in <strong>air-gapped</strong> environments or any major cloud, with secure access on government-furnished equipment without device modifications.</li>
<li><strong>Supports all IDEs</strong>, developer tools, and programming languages, allowing teams to standardize environments while using familiar tooling.</li>
<li>Included in the <strong>Iron Bank</strong> and <strong>Big Bang</strong> repositories, ensuring alignment with U.S. federal security standards.</li>
<li><strong>Simplifies accreditation</strong> processes in the U.S. and European regions, meeting stringent compliance requirements.</li>
</ul>

<p style="border-bottom:1px solid #FFF; margin: 30px 0;"></p>

<p>Development teams in government and defense agencies face distinct challenges, including safeguarding classified source code and data, managing contractor onboarding and offboarding efficiently, and securely working within air-gapped environments.</p>

<p>Public sector organizations often prioritize reliability and security when adopting new technologies. However, many developers in these agencies still rely on local development environments, which increases the risks of data exfiltration and environment inconsistencies.</p>

<p>This tension between maintaining security and optimizing developer productivity is not new; however, it highlights the need for purpose-built tech that addresses these challenges.</p>

<h2>Palantir’s Experience with Coder</h2>

<p>While all of our public sector customers prefer to keep their use of Coder confidential, Palantir offers a representative example of how organizations in adjacent industries benefit from Coder.</p>

<p>Operating in highly regulated spaces, Palantir faced challenges similar to those faced by government agencies, including the need for secure, efficient, and standardized development environments.</p>

<h3>Challenges</h3>

<p>As Palantir’s development teams grew, they faced increasing demands for faster build and test cycles, consistent development environments, and efficient onboarding for new developers. To address these needs, they considered several approaches:</p>

<ul>
<li><strong>Providing more powerful laptops</strong> addressed compute limitations but was neither scalable nor cost-effective. Nor did it address the inconsistencies with developers maintaining their own local environments.</li>
<li><strong>Self-service cloud VMs</strong> allowed developers to provision their own environments but introduced significant configuration overhead, which often resulted in cases of “it works on my machine.”</li>
<li><strong>Pre-configured VMs</strong> reduced setup time for developers but placed a heavy maintenance burden on infrastructure teams to ensure environments were patched and up to date. They were also costly, as over-provisioning at a 1-to-1 VM-to-developer ratio meant VMs often ran around the clock, even when developers weren’t actively working.</li>
</ul>

<p>None of these options fully addressed Palantir’s need for secure, scalable, and developer-friendly environments. They adopted Coder on Amazon’s Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) to meet the broad needs of their development teams.</p>

<h3>Solutions</h3>

<p>We think Palantir tells the story best, so <a href="https://blog.palantir.com/the-benefits-of-remote-ephemeral-workspaces-1a1251ed6e53">check out their blog post</a> for a detailed account of their experience with Coder. But to summarize, here’s what Palantir found most valuable about adopting Coder:</p>

<ul>
<li><strong>Coder works on top of Kubernetes</strong> for the compute layer. By combining it with Amazon EKS, Palantir minimized operational overhead for their infrastructure team, enabling them to focus on higher-value tasks.</li>
<li><strong>Developers retained the ability to use custom dotfiles and startup scripts</strong>, preserving years of personalized workflows. This blend of standardization and customization allowed environments to feel both consistent and familiar.</li>
<li><strong>With self-service access, developers could deploy new environments</strong>, request additional resources, and get to work faster—all with just a few clicks.</li>
<li><strong>Coder integrated seamlessly with GitHub Enterprise</strong>, making it easy for users to clone repositories and manage SSH configurations. Combined with self-service features, this eliminated much of the transactional support previously required from Palantir’s infrastructure team.</li>
</ul>

<p>These improvements translated into measurable gains, including a <strong>78% reduction</strong> in front-end build times, <strong>71% faster</strong> git clone speeds, and significantly reduced onboarding and support overhead. Developers were empowered to focus on building and collaborating, while infrastructure teams dedicated more time to optimizing tools instead of troubleshooting issues.</p>

<h2>Purpose-Built for Secure and Standardized Development</h2>

<p>Coder centralizes development environments on fully air-gapped infrastructure, providing the control and security required for classified work while eliminating burdensome toil that crushes developer productivity.</p>

<p>Government agencies choose Coder because it addresses three mission-critical needs: centralized management of development environments, alignment with existing security protocols in their on-prem infrastructure, and solutions that reduce developer toil to boost productivity:</p>

<h3>Absolute Security and Compliance</h3>

<p>Coder meets the stringent security requirements of government and defense agencies. Its <a href="https://coder.com/blog/coder-well-architected-framework">self-hosted and open-source architecture</a> ensures that all data, source code, and development environments remain within an organization’s controlled infrastructure and never need to be stored on a developer’s local laptop. This eliminates a critical risk vector while simplifying the accreditation process for standards like the US Authority to Operate and UK NCSC guidelines.</p>

<p>With air-gapped deployments, end-to-end encryption, and role-based access control, Coder provides the control and protection required for managing sensitive code and data. Additionally, Coder is available in the Iron Bank and Big Bang repositories, ensuring easy access and alignment with federal security standards.</p>

<h3>Standardization Through Infrastructure as Code</h3>

<p>Coder enables agencies to standardize and manage development environments using <a href="https://coder.com/docs/admin/templates">Terraform templates</a>, ensuring every environment is consistent, reproducible, and secure by default. For agencies with multi-organization deployments, Coder allows each organization to operate completely independently with unique users, workspace templates, and underlying infrastructure. This ensures isolated operations, providing the flexibility to accommodate contractors, separate teams, or different classified projects while maintaining strict security boundaries and operational autonomy.</p>

<h3>Operational Efficiency in Secure Environments</h3>

<p>With automated workspace provisioning, developers can be onboarded to new environments in minutes instead of the days or weeks required before Coder. They can use their government-furnished equipment without modification, keeping a restricted Windows OS while coding in secure Coder workspaces on any version of Linux or other operating systems, such as legacy Windows.</p>

<p>Moving from a stock Windows GFE laptop to Linux with the necessary libraries and permissions at one government organization took four months of approvals and queues. Coder eliminates this delay with pre-configured workspaces, enabling faster productivity. This also means developers can rely on thin clients instead of high-powered machines, as all compute happens securely within the organization’s private infrastructure.</p>

<h2>Non-Negotiable Security, Uncompromising Productivity</h2>

<p>Security and governance aren’t optional for public sector teams—they’re non-negotiable. Coder delivers on that promise by keeping source code and data secure within controlled infrastructure while simplifying development workflows.</p>

<p>Developers spend less time troubleshooting and more time coding, and infrastructure teams can focus on improving tools instead of firefighting approval queues and support requests. With Coder, organizations handling sensitive data can work smarter without compromising on what matters most.</p>

<p>Do you want to hear more about how other regulated companies secure their development environments with Coder? <a href="https://coder.com/demo">Contact us for a demo today</a>.</p>


Learn how Coder helps government and defense agencies securely manage their development environments while meeting strict compliance standards. With support for all developer tools and air-gapped infrastructure, Coder makes it easier for teams to stay productive without sacrificing security.

Coder Secures and Accelerates Mission-Critical Innovation in the Public Sector

<h2>Summary: Why Technology Companies Choose Coder</h2>

<ul>
<li>Developers can spin up reliable, <strong>ready-to-code environments in minutes</strong>, ensuring consistency and reducing lost time during project onboarding.</li>
<li>Coder’s <strong>open-source platform</strong> gives companies the flexibility to inspect, extend, and integrate it with other internal developer platforms like Backstage.</li>
<li>Automated resource management <strong>optimizes cloud spend</strong> without sacrificing performance.</li>
<li>Sensitive data and source code remain secure with Coder’s <strong>self-hosted model</strong>, meeting even the strictest security requirements.</li>
<li><strong>Access to cloud-based GPUs</strong> and scalable resources makes Coder a perfect fit for machine learning and generative AI workloads.</li>
</ul>

<p style="border-bottom:1px solid #FFF; margin: 30px 0;"></p>

<p>Innovation is more than a buzzword for tech companies where a faster release, quicker iteration, or a frictionless developer workflow can be the difference between setting the pace and scrambling to keep up.</p>

<p>Whether our customers lead the charge in autonomous driving systems or redefine entertainment streaming, they all recognize that innovation doesn’t happen out of thin air. It starts with developers. They understand that giving their teams the right tools and environments isn’t just a perk; it’s how they stay competitive. </p>

<p>Like the platform engineering teams in our customers’ organizations, everything we do is rooted in solving problems for developers because we know that if we’re not making their lives better, the rest doesn’t matter.</p>

<p>Coder’s <a href="https://coder.com/cde">cloud development environments</a> aren’t just about securing development environments—although that’s a big deal, too—they’re about removing the friction that slows teams down. We believe consistency, speed, and adaptability make a difference when developers are heads-down on the next big thing.</p>

<h2>Real-World Success: Standardizing Environments at Scale</h2>

<h3>Dropbox Simplifies Environment Provisioning with Coder</h3>

<p><strong>Challenge</strong></p>

<p>Provisioning developer environments with <a href="https://coder.com/success-stories/dropbox">legacy in-house tooling</a> was slow and error-prone. Before adopting Coder, Dropbox used a monolithic, Python-based solution to provision VM-based development environments for more than 1,000 engineers. While functional, this approach introduced significant challenges:</p>

<ul>
<li>The in-house solution was complex and difficult to maintain. Adding new features or configurations required non-trivial effort and detailed documentation, slowing down the pace of innovation.</li>
<li>Developers relied on command-line tools and lengthy documentation to create and manage environments, resulting in a frustrating and inefficient developer experience.</li>
<li>The legacy system lacked optimization for cloud usage, leading to the over-provisioning of VMs and higher operational costs.</li>
</ul>

<p><strong>Solution</strong></p>

<p>In just four months, Dropbox’s engineering team migrated 1,000 developers to Coder cloud development environments. These new environments delivered faster provisioning, improved usability, and reduced costs:</p>

<ul>
<li>Coder’s Terraform-based templates on AWS EC2 allowed for quick and consistent environment provisioning. <strong>Startup times improved by 75%</strong>, enabling developers to get to work faster.</li>
<li>Coder delivered a development experience that felt as natural as working locally, with full support for developers’ preferred tools, IDEs, and custom dotfiles. This reduced friction, boosted adoption, and <strong>freed engineers to focus on building</strong> rather than managing environments.</li>
<li>Features like autostart/stop functionality, scheduling, and bin packing multiple workspaces per VM helped Dropbox <strong>cut cloud computing and storage costs by 30%</strong>, without sacrificing performance.</li>
</ul>

<h3>Skydio Powers AI and ML Workloads with Coder</h3>

<p><strong>Challenge</strong></p>

<p>Skydio, known for its autonomous drones, designs and builds everything in-house—from the hardware and onboard software to the SaaS platform that manages it all. Their development efforts spanned <a href="https://coder.com/success-stories/skydio">everything from AI/ML training with GPUs</a> to deploying updates for autonomous drones in the field.</p>

<p>But slow, manual processes made onboarding and managing environments a constant pain for developers and IT alike:</p>

<ul>
<li>Developers spent up to a week setting up workstations with tools, codebases, and dependencies, requiring frequent IT assistance.</li>
<li>A homegrown virtual desktop system lacked automation, leaving VMs and GPUs running 24/7, unnecessarily driving up cloud costs.</li>
<li>Maintaining and customizing environments for specialized tasks, like AI/ML workflows or GPU-based training, was time-consuming and pulled focus from core development work.</li>
</ul>

<p><strong>Solution</strong></p>

<p>Skydio replaced their homegrown virtual desktop system with Coder, fundamentally changing how they provisioned and managed developer environments. In just a few months, they transitioned fully to Coder, and the results were immediately self-evident:</p>

<ul>
<li>Automated shutdowns for idle VMs and GPUs reduced cloud computing expenses by 90%, eliminating the inefficiencies of their previous system.</li>
<li>New developers could configure workstations and make their first production commits in under an hour, compared to a week previously.</li>
<li>Using Terraform, Skydio built templates for specific workflows, including GPU-enabled environments for AI/ML training and GUI-based workflows like 3D rendering.</li>
<li>Skydio could roll out new datasets or tool upgrades to all developer environments instantly, keeping teams aligned without disruption.</li>
<li>Standardized environments meant developers could quickly resolve build issues using shared templates and internal help forums.</li>
</ul>

<h2>Features and Benefits for Innovators in Tech</h2>

<p>Tech companies often find themselves at a critical juncture: build versus buy. Many of these companies, despite their engineering prowess, have attempted to build internal solutions for managing development environments and discovered firsthand how difficult it is to scale effectively. That’s when they turn to Coder—a <a href="https://coder.com/cde">cloud development environment</a> designed to solve these challenges and more.</p>

<p>Here’s what draws these companies to Coder:</p>

<ul>
<li><strong>Improved Developer Experience</strong> - These companies are laser-focused on giving developers the best tools to stay productive. Coder reduces support tickets for platform engineering teams by delivering consistent, predictable environments that just work. Developers can move quickly, spin up new environments in minutes, and avoid the pain of troubleshooting or rebuilding broken local environments.</li>
<li><strong>Ephemeral and Consistent Environments</strong> - The ability to spin up clean, <a href="https://coder.com/docs/user-guides/workspace-lifecycle">ephemeral environments</a> is invaluable. Developers can experiment freely, knowing they can destroy and recreate environments at any time without fear of downtime or unexpected behavior.</li>
<li><strong>Open Source and Extensibility</strong> - Tech innovators care deeply about how their software stack works. With Coder being <a href="https://github.com/coder/coder">open source</a>, they can inspect the code, scan for vulnerabilities, and even extend the platform to meet their specific needs—whether that’s wrapping the CLI, adding a custom UI, or integrating with internal developer platforms like <a href="https://coder.com/cde/backstage">Backstage</a>.</li>
<li><strong>Self-Hosted for Security</strong> - Many of these companies have strict security requirements, making Coder’s self-hosted model a major advantage. Sensitive code and data stay within their controlled infrastructure—Coder can be hosted on <a href="https://coder.com/docs/install/cloud">any cloud</a> or <a href="https://coder.com/docs/install/offline">on-premises</a>—ensuring compliance and reducing exfiltration risks.</li>
<li><strong>Cost Efficiency</strong> - Over-provisioning VMs on a one-to-one developer-to-VM ratio can drive up costs quickly. Coder’s ability to manage resources more effectively—like running multiple workspaces on a single VM or <a href="https://coder.com/docs/user-guides/workspace-scheduling">shutting down idle environments</a>—helps these companies control cloud spend without sacrificing performance.</li>
<li><strong>Powerful Cloud Resources</strong> - For ML-heavy workloads and GPU-intensive tasks, even the most expensive local machines can’t compete with the scalability of the cloud. Coder gives these teams access to the horsepower they need, enabling faster AI/ML training and experimentation.</li>
<li><strong>GenAI Tool Distribution</strong> - Many of these companies are early adopters of <a href="https://coder.com/blog/deploy-generative-ai-at-scale-with-one-code-block-using-coder-vs-code-web-and-git">generative AI tools like Copilot</a>. With Coder, they can manage these tools centrally—distributing approved versions, pushing updates across all workspaces, and <a href="https://coder.com/docs/admin/templates/managing-templates/image-management">maintaining consistent development environments</a>.</li>
</ul>

<h2>Empowering Developers, Enabling Innovation</h2>

<p>Innovation thrives when developers can focus on building and experimenting without being held back by clunky tools or complex setups. For the world’s largest tech companies, this means having development environments that are consistent, reliable, and ready to handle anything.</p>

<p>Coder’s open-source, cloud-based platform delivers the flexibility these companies need. By enabling developer productivity and autonomy, Coder helps leading tech companies stay ahead in an ever-changing landscape.</p>

<p>To hear more about how other innovative companies improve developer experience with Coder, <a href="https://coder.com/demo">contact us today</a>.</p>


Discover how leading tech companies like Dropbox and Skydio use Coder to empower their developers with faster onboarding, consistent environments, and the flexibility to innovate. 

How Coder Enables Innovation at Leading Tech Companies

Jess Sweet

Sr. Product Marketing Manager

<p>As 2024 winds down, we’re taking a moment to reflect on a busy year for Coder and our community. It’s been a year full of innovation, feedback, and collaboration—and it’s all thanks to you. To wrap things up, let’s spotlight a collection of features we released for our open-source community this year. Here’s to the journey and what’s to come in 2025.</p>


A Look Back: Popular Coder Releases of 2024

<h2>New to Coder Open-Source in 2024</h2>

<h3>Backstage Integration</h3>


<p>Give developers one-click access from Backstage to a pre-provisioned cloud development environment. This integration allows teams to simplify access to tools and ensure configurations stay consistent across projects.</p>

<p><a href="https://coder.com/blog/coder-backstage-plugin">Learn more →</a></p>

<h3>Windows OS Support</h3>


<p>Bring Windows development tools like Visual Studio, PowerShell, and MATLAB to the cloud. Developers working on Windows-specific projects can now enjoy the flexibility of cloud environments without giving up their preferred tools.</p>

<p><a href="https://coder.com/blog/run-windows-development-environments-with-coder">Learn more →</a></p>

<h3>Dev Containers via Envbuilder</h3>

<p>Dev Containers with Envbuilder let developers customize their environments on top of standardized base images. This flexibility ensures consistency across teams while allowing individuals to adapt workspaces to their specific needs.</p>

<p><a href="https://coder.com/docs/admin/templates/managing-templates/devcontainers">Learn more →</a></p>

<h3><del>ClickOps</del> GitOps via Terraform Providers</h3>

<p>Replace manual ClickOps with declarative infrastructure management through the coderd Terraform provider. Use Git workflows to manage templates, enforce governance, and give developers visibility into templates, allowing them to propose changes with pull requests.</p>

<p><a href="https://coder.com/blog/release-recap-2-15-0">Learn more →</a></p>

<h3>Notifications</h3>

<p><img src="https://www.datocms-assets.com/19109/1734138159-notifications.png" style="max-width:100%" /></p>

<p>Stay updated with real-time notifications about workspace status and events via Teams, Slack, email, or webhook. Developers and admins can stay informed and respond quickly without constant manual checks.</p>

<p><a href="https://coder.com/docs/admin/monitoring/notifications">Learn more →</a></p>

<h3>New Workspace Modules</h3>

<p>Extend your development environments with modules like KasmVNC for web-based desktops, Amazon DCV for high-performance remote Windows desktops, and Cursor AI for AI-powered coding assistance in the popular IDE.</p>

<p><a href="https://registry.coder.com/modules">Learn more →</a></p>

<h3>Workspace Build Timeline</h3>


<p>Visualize the steps in your workspace provisioning process to identify delays and improve setup times. This feature helps teams identify issues so they can <a href="https://coder.com/docs/tutorials/best-practices/speed-up-templates">optimize environment build performance</a>. </p>

<p><a href="https://coder.com/blog/release-recap-2-17-0">Learn more →</a></p>

<h3>Shared Ports</h3>

<p>Easily share development server ports with your team, enabling collaborative testing and debugging without complex network configurations.</p>

<p><a href="https://coder.com/docs/admin/networking/port-forwarding#sharing-ports">Learn more →</a></p>

<h3>Observability Helm Chart</h3>

<p>Deploy the Observability Helm Chart to monitor your Coder deployment with pre-configured Grafana dashboards and Prometheus metrics. This helps teams ensure reliability and identify performance issues quickly.</p>

<p><a href="https://coder.com/docs/admin/monitoring#quick-start-observability-helm-chart">Learn more →</a></p>

<h3>5x Faster Networking</h3>

<p>Experience up to 5x faster throughput starting in Coder 2.12.0, thanks to resized TCP buffers and a reworked TCP stack that reduces packet loss. These enhancements improve file transfers, stabilize connections, and enhance performance for demanding applications.</p>

<p><a href="https://coder.com/blog/release-recap-2-12-0-is-here-and-it-s-5x-faster">Learn more →</a></p>

<h2>Always Tinkering: Open-Source Projects Beyond Coder</h2>

<p>At Coder, one of our core values is to always tinker. This means we’re constantly experimenting, building, and sharing new ideas with the open-source community, even when those projects aren’t directly tied to cloud development environments. This year, we’ve introduced a few open-source tools that reflect our commitment to always tinkering.</p>

<h3>Wush: Peer-to-Peer File Transfers for Developers</h3>

<p><img src="https://www.datocms-assets.com/19109/1734139561-wush.png" style="max-width:100%" /></p>

<p><a href="https://wush.dev/send">Wush.dev</a> is a peer-to-peer file transfer tool designed to overcome the limitations of traditional CLI tools. Built on the same high-performance networking layer as Coder’s core product, Wush avoids slow relay servers and third-party trust-based authentication, offering faster, more secure transfers.</p>

<p><a href="https://github.com/coder/wush/">Learn more →</a></p>

<h3>Quartz: Deterministic Time Testing for Go</h3>

<p><a href="https://github.com/coder/quartz">Quartz</a> is a mocking library for Go that helps developers write precise, repeatable unit tests for time-dependent code. By mocking real-time calls, Quartz ensures consistent results and faster execution during testing. This tool is perfect for teams building time-critical systems. </p>

<p><a href="https://coder.com/blog/introducing-quartz">Learn more →</a></p>

<h2>See You in 2025</h2>

<p>As we close out 2024, we want to thank you—our customers, contributors, and community—for your support, collaboration, and feedback throughout the year. Every feature we build and every project we tinker with is inspired by our community’s needs. We look forward to continuing to grow, innovate, and work together in 2025.</p>

<p>Here’s to another year of keeping developers in flow, together.</p>


As 2024 comes to a close, we’re pausing to look back on an eventful year for Coder and our community. This year has been marked by growth, creativity, and meaningful collaboration, all made possible by your support.

A Look Back: Coder Releases of 2024

<p>As sustainability becomes a higher priority for enterprises, modern technologies like cloud development environments are quietly making an impact. Although the primary focus is often on their immediate benefits, such as centralized and standardized development workspaces, improved security, and better developer experiences, they also offer another compelling advantage: <strong>environmental sustainability</strong>.</p>

<p>Here’s how modern cloud development environments contribute to greener initiatives while evolving how development teams work.</p>

<h2>Breaking the Habit of Wasteful Overprovisioning</h2>

<p>It’s not uncommon for platform and DevOps teams to provision virtual machines at a 1:1 developer-to-VM ratio. This is like assigning one person an entire building when they only need a single office. VMs typically run 24/7, consuming energy even when no one’s using them, but CDEs flip this inefficient model on its head.</p>

<p>With <a href="https://coder.com/cde">Coder CDEs</a>, environments and their infrastructure only run when developers actively need them, minimizing wasted resources. Coder automatically monitors resource usage to optimize consumption and create efficiencies across developers’ available infrastructure. Additionally, it enables multiple workspaces to share the resources of a single VM, reducing the number of machines sitting idle in the background.</p>

<p>For example, with Coder’s management layer for automatically shutting down under-utilized VMs, <a href="https://coder.com/success-stories/skydio">Skydio can run ten Coder workspaces</a> for the cost of a single workspace in their prior homegrown solution. This optimized use of resources reduces costs and substantially cuts energy consumption, benefiting both IT budgets and the environment.</p>

<h2>Optimizing Resource Usage</h2>

<p>Coder provides mechanisms to manage resource allocation, making sure resources are used as efficiently as possible without negatively impacting developer experience and performance. <a href="https://coder.com/docs/admin/users/quotas">Resource quotas</a> play a key role in preventing over-provisioning and runaway costs at the developer level, so no individual workspace consumes excessive resources.</p>

<p>Features like <a href="https://coder.com/docs/user-guides/workspace-scheduling#autostop">autostop</a> for idle workspaces further reduce waste by halting unused environments, while <a href="https://coder.com/docs/user-guides/workspace-scheduling">workspace scheduling</a> can be configured to automatically start environments when developers typically need them. Together, Coder’s resource management features maintain a balance between performance, cost efficiency, and sustainability.</p>

<h2>Lighter Laptops, Longer Lifespans</h2>

<p>Gone are the days when developers needed the most powerful laptops to handle local builds, testing, and resource-heavy tooling. CDEs shift the computational load to scalable cloud resources, freeing developers from relying on top-dollar hardware.</p>

<p>For example, ML engineers and data scientists no longer need laptops with expensive GPUs to locally train models or process large datasets. Instead, they can leverage cloud-based resources tailored for intensive computational tasks, all from a lightweight thin client.</p>

<p>With less stress placed on their devices, laptops can last much longer before they need to be replaced. That’s fewer machines ending up in landfills and fewer resources wasted on producing high-performance laptops.</p>

<h2>Supporting Sustainability in the Cloud</h2>

<p>Cloud providers like AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure are investing heavily in renewable energy and carbon-neutral operations. AWS is aiming for <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/energy/transition1/">100% renewable energy by 2025</a>. Organizations indirectly benefit from these green initiatives by deploying Coder on these platforms.</p>

<p>Coder’s multi-cloud support means it can run anywhere—whether on these renewable-energy-driven cloud platforms or on-premises—giving enterprises the flexibility to meet their sustainability and operational needs. This ensures that the computing power driving developer productivity is increasingly sourced from renewable energy or tailored to leverage existing, efficient infrastructure.</p>

<h2>A Win-Win for Developers and the Planet</h2>

<p>Security, developer productivity, and cost savings are the key drivers of CDE consideration. However, when sustainability is part of the equation, it can tip the scales in favor of adoption, especially for companies with ambitious environmental goals.</p>

<p>Adopting CDEs doesn’t just save costs and improve workflows; it’s a step towards aligning your organization with the global push for sustainability. By choosing tools that balance productivity with environmental responsibility, enterprises will steward a new era of greener tech ecosystems.</p>


Cloud development environments not only increase developer productivity and security but also contribute to environmental sustainability by reducing resource waste, extending hardware lifespans, and leveraging renewable-energy-driven cloud platforms.

Building a Sustainable Future with Cloud Development Environments

<p>If you’ve ever ventured the halls – real or virtual – of your company’s sales organization at the end of the quarter, you’ve likely found sales managers unraveling BANT for their latest opportunities. Four ingredients can make or break any deal:</p>

<ul>
<li>Budget</li>
<li>Authority</li>
<li>Need</li>
<li>Timing</li>
</ul>

<p>After many thousands of badge scans and conversations at industry events, and nearly as many onsite customer visits, we’ve identified an interesting trend.</p>

<p>Without question, platform teams and development leads recognize the clear benefits of cloud development environments. However, after their excitement peaks and their tinkering with our open-source platform concludes, reality sets in. They release a visceral sigh when they realize they need to sell the promise of CDEs up the chain of command to capture the necessary budget.</p>

<p>Defeated, these stewards of developer experience and operational excellence wander off, unsure of what to do next. Is it even worth the frustration? Is their folded tradeshow data sheet enough to spark a conversation?</p>

<p>You might have influence or even authority. You absolutely have a need. And the timing? Yesterday, of course. However, one key ingredient is missing: budget.</p>

<p>We partner with platform teams and other technical buyers daily to help them navigate these complicated waters. Here are a few strategies we’ve found effective in advancing internal conversations about cloud development environments.</p>

<h2>Understand what matters to your leadership</h2>

<p>By framing the conversation around company goals and providing a clear business case, you stand a better chance of turning what could be perceived as a “nice to have” into a “must have.” You often have one swing at this, so let’s make it count.</p>

<p>We’re all technically minded, but it’s important to refrain from immediately diving into the feature-level details, take a step back, and consider what your leadership team cares about most. In the era of doing more with less, but not at the expense of speed and security, it’s a safe bet that your company’s objectives closely align to:</p>

<ul>
<li>Revenue growth</li>
<li>Operational and cost-efficiency</li>
<li>Risk management</li>
<li>Innovation and competitiveness</li>
</ul>

<p>Your role is to connect the dots between these strategic objectives and the outcomes a CDE like Coder offers. While you might get excited about how you can scale Coder on K8s, your leadership team wants to know how that translates into tangible benefits for the business.</p>

<h2>Focus on cost and efficiency</h2>

<p>One of the first things executives want to know is how a new tool or initiative impacts the bottom line. If you ask them to invest in Coder, you must show how it will save money, improve efficiency, or ideally both.</p>

<p>Starting points to consider:</p>

<ul>
<li> <strong>Optimizing cloud resources</strong> – <a href="https://coder.com/ebooks-and-reports/reports/cde-adoption-report">We discovered that 1 in 3 developers</a> runs a VM 24x7 in most enterprise organizations. Coder maximizes cloud efficiency by eliminating idle VMs and automatically <a href="https://coder.com/success-stories/skydio">shutting down expensive GPUs</a> when ML jobs finish. This reduces cloud costs and ensures you’re only paying for active resources, helping to better manage budgets without sacrificing performance. Coder also serves as a modern alternative to legacy VDI for developers, commonly <a href="https://coder.com/blog/the-modern-alternative-to-vdi-for-developers">eliminating 90% or more of the costs</a> associated with VDI.</li>
<li> <strong>Faster onboarding &amp; reboarding</strong> – Coder centralizes and standardizes development environments, making it easier for new hires to get up to speed or for existing developers to swivel chair between projects. What used to take days (or even weeks) to configure locally <a href="https://coder.com/success-stories/global-investment-firm">can now be done in minutes</a>. Less time onboarding means developers contribute to projects faster, accelerating their time-to-value and improving developer experience.</li>
<li> <strong>Developer productivity</strong> – Faster, more reliable environments lead to more productive developers. If leadership can see that an investment in <a href="https://coder.com/success-stories/dropbox">Coder leads to fewer disruptions</a>, reduced ticket queues, <a href="https://coder.com/blog/scaling-genai-in-software-development-key-takeaways-from-our-may-webinar">consistent GenAI tool</a> deployment, and faster coding feedback cycles, they’ll appreciate the long-term efficiency gains. Plus, productive developers are happy developers, and happy developers typically stick around. Finding, hiring, and onboarding new developers is an expensive endeavor.</li>
</ul>

<p>Your case becomes much more compelling when you quantify these benefits in terms of dollars saved or hours gained. If you need air support for this, <a href="https://coder.com/contact/sales">let us know</a>. One of our first steps is to help you craft a detailed value hypothesis because if we can’t help you prove the value, then nothing else matters.</p>

<h2>Highlight security and compliance</h2>

<p>Security is another high-priority issue for leadership teams. A security breach or non-compliance can result in massive financial penalties, reputational damage, and operational disruptions. For many companies, the cost of mitigating these risks is a primary driver behind new investments.</p>

<p>Key points to address:</p>

<ul>
<li><strong>Centralized control and governance</strong> – Coder offers a “golden path” by standardizing development environments, <a href="https://coder.com/webinars/high-security-cloud-dev-environments/register">ensuring consistent security and compliance by default</a>. Through centralized management, you can enforce access controls, monitor usage, and perform audits, reducing vulnerabilities from decentralized developer environments and improving recovery times in case of an incident.</li>
<li><strong>Consistent updates and patching</strong> – Since Coder manages developer environments in the cloud, updates and security patches can be deployed centrally and consistently. This eliminates the variability that often comes with developers managing their own environments locally, where outdated software and tooling can become vulnerable.</li>
<li><strong>Reduced attack surface</strong> – By minimizing the need for developers to work directly on their local machines, Coder reduces the risk of local data loss or other threats compromising their workstations. In the event of a breach, centralized environments can be audited and isolated more easily than distributed local systems. Coder effectively transforms each developer’s device into a thin client.</li>
</ul>

<p>By focusing on how Coder minimizes security risks, you’ll help leadership see that it’s not just a productivity tool – it’s a risk management solution.</p>

<h2>Align with strategic initiatives</h2>

<p>Another important step is to tie Coder’s benefits to any ongoing or planned strategic initiatives within your company. Is your organization undergoing a digital transformation? Is there a push toward remote work? Are local development environments the final boss fight in a broader migration to the cloud?</p>

<p>Show how Coder fits within these broader efforts and helps support key initiatives.</p>

<p>Possible angles to explore:</p>

<ul>
<li><strong>Remote work enablement</strong> – In a world where remote and hybrid work have become the norm, Coder means that your developers can access consistent, secure environments from anywhere. This aligns with efforts to maintain flexibility while reducing the complexity of managing distributed teams. This is especially true if you lean on contractors who might bring their own devices or need to get up and running quickly before they become frustrated and churn.</li>
<li><strong>Agile transformation</strong> – We get it. Agile has been downgraded to a buzzword, but if your company is focused on becoming more agile, Coder supports faster, iterative development cycles. The ability to spin up and tear down ephemeral environments quickly complements Agile processes, giving teams the flexibility to experiment and innovate faster without the risk of destroying coveted local environments.</li>
<li><strong>ML operations</strong> – Coder enables the migration of <a href="https://coder.com/solutions/dataops">ML operations</a> to the cloud by providing access to powerful cloud compute resources like GPUs. This allows teams to run intensive ML workflows in the cloud, reducing reliance on local machines and enabling more scalable processing. With Coder, data scientists can work directly alongside real training data, obviating the need to create and secure local data sets.</li>
</ul>

<p>By linking Coder to larger, organizational initiatives, you’ll help leadership see it as a strategic investment, not just another tool for developers.</p>

<h2>Build a compelling ROI case</h2>

<p>Ultimately, most purchasing decisions come down to ROI. If you can demonstrate a clear return on investment, you’re much more likely to get the green light. We can help you use hard data and real-world examples wherever possible.</p>

<p>Here’s how to build a strong ROI case for Coder:</p>

<ul>
<li><strong>Calculate time savings</strong> – Estimate how much time your team spends setting up environments, dealing with inconsistencies, and troubleshooting local issues. Compare that to the time saved with ready-to-use cloud development environments.</li>
<li><strong>Factor in reduced downtime</strong> – How often are your developers delayed because of environment issues, dependency conflicts, or other disruptions? Reduced downtime directly impacts productivity, which translates to faster project completion.</li>
<li><strong>Quantify infrastructure savings</strong> – Calculate the savings from optimizing cloud resources with Coder. By shutting down idle VMs, automatically turning off GPUs when jobs are complete, and preventing unnecessary resource usage, Coder helps you reduce cloud costs.</li>
<li><strong>Leverage customer success stories</strong> – Many companies that have adopted Coder report significant gains in both productivity and security. <a href="https://coder.com/success-stories">Share these case studies</a> with leadership to show that others in your industry have seen measurable benefits.</li>
</ul>

<p>Providing a clear, numbers-driven argument can be the key to unlocking the budget for Coder. We’ve found that conservative value hypotheses are a powerful strategy for advancing the conversation around CDEs. Even if we cut those projections in half (and in half again), they still deliver a compelling business case that is hard to dismiss.</p>

<h2>Make it about the business</h2>

<p>When it comes to winning executive buy-in for a CDE, it’s all about making the case in terms of business value. Developers and engineers naturally focus on the technical side of things, but leadership is more interested in how a tool will impact efficiency, security, and the company’s bottom line.</p>

<p>By tying Coder’s benefits to organizational goals like cost savings, risk reduction, and strategic initiatives, you’ll be better positioned to secure the support you need. Approach the conversation from their perspective, show measurable benefits, and frame Coder as a critical piece of the bigger picture.</p>

<p>Next steps: Prepare your case, gather your data, and <a href="https://coder.com/contact/sales">let us help you</a> present Coder as a business solution your company needs.</p>


Check out our top strategies that you can use to align the benefits of Coder with business goals, helping you demonstrate ROI and secure executive buy-in for cloud development environments.

Selling the Cloud Dream and Turning CDEs Into an Executive No-Brainer

<p>It’s a new month, and June has seemingly passed in a flash.</p>

<p>In case you missed it, we closed our latest funding round last week, bringing our total Series B funding to $65M. You can dive into the <a href="https://www.coder.com//blog/coder-raises-35m-in-latest-funding-round" target="_blank">details here</a>, but suffice it to say we’re excited to build upon the momentum you helped us establish so far. Thank you.</p>

<p>Additionally, we officially promoted two open-source projects to v1.0 and released a new experiment in 2.13.0. Check out the details below.</p>

<h2>Admins: We Made a Minor UI Update</h2>

<p>We usually don’t announce UI changes, but 2.13.0 brings a navigation change for Coder Administrators that might catch your attention. Don’t worry; you haven’t lost access to the main navigation links for Users, Deployment, and Health. We just had to move them to make way for new features that we look forward to telling you about in a future release.</p>

<p><img src="https://www.datocms-assets.com/19109/1719578216-updated-navigation.png" style="width:100%"/></p>

<h2>VSCode Desktop Extension v1.0</h2>

<p>Developers love our <a href="https://github.com/coder/vscode-coder" target="_blank">VSCode extension</a> because they can start and access Coder Workspaces with a single click directly from their desktop IDE. It perfectly fits their existing workflows. In June, we spent a few cycles upgrading our extension to release it as v1.0 officially.</p>

<p><img src="https://www.datocms-assets.com/19109/1719578637-vs-extension.png" style="width:100%"/></p>

<p>Now, our VSCode extension automatically opens the “last used” folder upon connection, delivering a familiar experience to developers who previously managed local development environments. Version 1.0 also includes the ability to download the extension without the Coder binary and better guidance for handling SSL certificate-related authentication issues.</p>

<h2>Terraform Provider v1.0</h2>

<p>Our <a href="https://github.com/coder/terraform-provider-coder" target="_blank">Terraform Provider</a> is the primary interface that Coder Admins use in Templates to provision Coder Workspaces. We made a few minor improvements that are be rolled into v1.0, including completed documentation, a new versioning schema to support automatic migrations, and clear deprecation messaging.</p>

<p>We encourage you to migrate to the newest versions of both our VSCode extension and Terraform Provider automatically from now on.</p>

<h2>New Experiment in 2.13.0</h2>

<p>As the name implies, <a href="https://coder.com/docs/contributing/feature-stages#experimental-features" target="_blank">experimental features</a> can introduce performance or stability risks. <strong>We recommend tinkering with experiments in non-production deployments</strong>.</p>

<h3>Experimental: Windows Desktop Module</h3>

<p>We launched a new experimental Windows RDP module, enabling developers to access Windows desktop environments directly through their web browser with one click. This simplifies package installation, debugging, and testing on GCP, Azure, and AWS Windows Templates. We aim to support developers who need Windows environments but do not require the overhead and expense of dedicated virtual desktop infrastructure.</p>

<p>This experimental module can be found in the <a href="https://registry.coder.com/modules/windows-rdp" target="_blank">Coder Registry</a>. For now, this module is most stable on GCP Workspaces and we’re actively improving stability on Azure and AWS.</p>

<h2>Bug Fixes</h2>

<p>We release bug fixes and patches as needed throughout the month. Check out <a href="https://github.com/coder/coder/releases" target="_blank">Coder releases</a> on GitHub for full details on the latest patches. Find a bug? <a href="https://github.com/coder/coder/issues" target="_blank">Tag it here</a> to let us know.</p>



June flew by, and last week we closed our latest funding round, bringing our total Series B funding to $65M. Additionally, we promoted two open-source projects to v1.0 and released a new experiment in version 2.13.0.

See What's New with Coder

Release Recap: 2.13.0, Experimental Windows Desktop Module, and Other v1.0 Project Milestones

<p>Version 2.12.0 has landed, and we’re excited to share that its throughput is <strong>5X faster than previous Coder versions</strong>. We’ll deep dive into the details of these major throughput improvements with Coder Principal Engineer, Spike Curtis. </p>

<p>This release also introduces several new features, such as support for multiple announcement banners, more visibility into IDE usage patterns, and the ability for developers to provision Workspaces in the environment of their choice.</p>

<h2>How We Achieved 5X Faster Throughput in 2.12.0</h2>

<p>Since version 2.9.0, we&#39;ve made several improvements to our networking layer, culminating in remarkable performance gains in 2.12.0. You’ll immediately notice faster file transfers to and from your Coder Workspaces, more stable connections with less initial stutter, and a smoother experience when testing resource-heavy applications. </p>

<p>Our latest improvements include resizing TCP buffers for high-throughput connections, implementing the HyStart algorithm to manage initial traffic bursts, and reworking the TCP stack and encryption connection to minimize packet loss. These changes have unlocked phenomenal performance improvements, enhancing an already fast remote development experience.</p>

<p><img src="https://www.datocms-assets.com/19109/1717161538-frame-1.png" style="width:100%; border: 1px solid #262626; border-radius:5px;"/></p>

<p><a href="https://coder.com/blog/delivering-5x-faster-throughput-in-coder-2-12-0" target="_blank">Take a peek behind the scenes</a> with Coder Principal Engineer, Spike Curtis, to learn more about how we achieved this networking feat.</p>

<h2>Other Updates in 2.12.0</h2>

<h3>Display Multiple Announcement Banners in Coders</h3>


<p>With 2.12.0, Coder Enterprise admins can simultaneously display multiple announcement banners to developers in the Coder UI. Customize the messaging and colors to ensure important updates are always visible to every user of your Coder deployment. You can easily manage announcement banners within Coder’s admin dashboard or via API to inform everyone about service changes, upgrades, and new feature rollouts.</p>

<ul>
<li><a href="https://coder.com/docs/admin/appearance#announcement-banner" target="_blank">Coder documentation</a></li>
</ul>

<h3>Enable Developers to Provision Workspaces in Their Preferred Environments</h3>

<p>We’ve added a new parameter that allows developers to choose the environment their Workspace runs in, whether it&#39;s different regions, clouds, or hostnames. This is ideal for scenarios like multiregion/multicloud deployments and running Workspaces on VMs or local laptops. With a zero-trust approach, Template Admins can maintain a single Template while developers have the flexibility to select their ideal  Workspace environment.</p>

<ul>
<li><a href="https://coder.com/docs/admin/provisioners" target="_blank">Coder documentation</a></li>
</ul>

<h3>Measure Unique IDE and App Sessions</h3>


<p>In addition to the total hours each IDE or app is used, Coder now tracks the number of unique sessions that last more than 30 minutes for each <code>coder_app</code> <a href="https://registry.terraform.io/providers/coder/coder/latest/docs/resources/app" target="_blank">resource</a>. This helps you monitor IDE and app usage more effectively by showing which are used multiple times during your chosen reporting window.</p>

<p>Currently, Coder tracks only IDEs and apps explicitly defined as <code>coder_app</code> in your Template’s Terraform file.</p>

<h2>Bug Fixes</h2>

<p>We release bug fixes and patches as needed throughout the month. Check out <a href="https://github.com/coder/coder/releases" target="_blank">Coder releases on GitHub</a> for full details on the latest patches.</p>

<p>Find a bug? <a href="https://github.com/coder/coder/issues" target="_blank">Tag it here</a> to let us know.</p>


Version 2.12.0 has landed, bringing 5X faster throughput, support for multiple announcement banners, detailed IDE usage visibility, and the ability for developers to provision Workspaces in their preferred environments.

Release Recap: 2.12.0 Is Here and It’s 5X Faster

<h2>Survival Depends on Developer Experience</h2>

<p>No one gets fired for playing it safe. Relying on virtual desktop infrastructure to protect valuable IP? Safe bet. While no one is getting fired for choosing VDI, certain people aren’t sticking around for it. And those certain people are developers – the innovative lifeblood of any enterprise.</p>

<p>Developer experience has been an unintended casualty in organizations’ pursuit of security and governance. Sure, VDI satisfies security teams’ concerns, but it was never designed with software development use cases or developer experience in mind. As a result, developers’ path of least resistance is to opt out of VDI&#39;s poor developer experience for greener pastures.</p>

<p>For companies whose competitive advantages are predicated on innovation and speed to market, the impact of VDI on developer experience becomes more than an employee retention issue. It poses an existential threat. Satisfied developers are not just productive; they are innovative. It stands to reason that companies are focused on improving their developer experience, and VDI is increasingly under the microscope.</p>

<p>At last, there is a superior alternative to VDI for developers.</p>

<p>With the rise of cloud development environments, platform teams are centralizing developer workspaces in their cloud or on-premises while using enterprise browsers to solve last-mile security requirements that were previously only addressed through VDI. <strong>The natural confluence between cloud development environments and enterprise browsers delivers a modern alternative to VDI</strong> that platform, security, and development teams have long awaited, and with it, the potential to reduce virtual desktop licensing, infrastructure, and management <a href="https://coder.com/success-stories/jbhunt">costs by 90% or more</a>.</p>

<h2>There’s a Problem When Every Click Feels Like a Gamble</h2>

<p>A lot has changed since VDI emerged in the early- to mid-2000s. Industries have been won and lost based on companies’ speed of innovation. No matter how razor-thin, any innovative advantage can decide whether a company dominates its landscape or fades into irrelevance.</p>

<p>Innovation begins with the developer. That’s why platform engineering teams are hyper-focused on improving their development teams’ quality of life. Their top priorities are automating frustrating toil and standardizing tools and environments. Reducing developers’ unnecessary cognitive load means they can focus more on solving business-critical problems.</p>

<p>An engineering lead described his experience with VDI, saying, “It’s like being stuck in a time warp where every click feels like a gamble.”</p>

<p>While hardly a comprehensive list, developers report the following as some of the most pervasive problems introduced by VDI:</p>

<ul>
<li><strong>Laggy or unresponsive</strong> cursor movements and keystrokes impact the speed and accuracy with which developers operate. At best, their experience is frustrating and, at worst, a risk to quality and morale.</li>
<li><strong>Slow processing times</strong> from underscaled resources and network latency affect application execution and data retrieval, introducing another bottleneck and decelerating progress. Improper resource management can lead to one developer&#39;s demands degrading others&#39; experiences.</li>
<li><strong>Tool compatibility conflicts</strong> arise because VDIs often run on Windows, while many development tools are designed for Linux distributions. This results in bugs being unknowingly shipped to different production environments and developers are left scrambling for hotfixes.</li>
</ul>

<p>Today, security teams own VDI licenses that are old enough to drive, and platform teams are left wondering how to unravel their developer experience within VDI. What if they could completely sidestep the inherent limitations of legacy VDI without compromising security or access control? What if developers didn’t have to work within the confines of VDI at all?</p>

<p>This is the paradigm shift that we’re excited to introduce.</p>

<h2>The Future of Software Development is Secure by Design</h2>

<p>Now, a natural partnership between two world-class enterprise-grade technologies, born from necessity, promises a modern alternative to VDI for developers.</p>

<p>Together, Coder and Island deliver a premium developer experience that eliminates the core problems developers face while navigating legacy VDI. The best part for platform and security teams is that they can <a href="https://coder.com/docs/guides/island-integration" target="_blank">achieve this developer experience</a> without compromising security or governance. Let’s unpack how Coder, a provider of self-hosted cloud development environments, and Island, the leading enterprise browser, unite to deliver an experience developers expect.</p>

<p>Coder is open source, runs air-gapped on-premises or in your cloud, and centralizes where developers work. Developers spin up their own cloud-based, ephemeral development environments in seconds, eliminating the need to spend days or weeks traversing outdated README files to provision local environments on their laptops. Coder cloud development environments are consistently provisioned as code and provide access to the IDEs, tools, and code your platform team pre-approves. Sensitive IP is accessed via web-based IDEs and never reaches developers’ laptops.</p>

<p>Island is an <a href="https://www.island.io/" target="_blank">enterprise browser</a> offering data protection unavailable in consumer-grade browsers. It’s the logical choice for enterprises that need to secure the last mile between developers and their Coder cloud development environments. Island is a Chromium-based browser that delivers a familiar experience while enforcing intelligent boundaries across all users, devices, apps, networks, and assets. Security teams can control everything that happens inside the browser, like preventing the copying and pasting of valuable source code to unsanctioned destinations or downloading and uploading files that contain sensitive data.</p>


Developers access their cloud development environments via Island's Enterprise Browser. This means platform engineers don't have to sacrifice developer experience for security and governance.

<p>The resulting confluence between Coder and Island means that your source code and development environments remain centralized and in your control at all times. With Island’s browser-level data protection, what developers can do with that source code is simply a function of the policies you configure.</p>

<p>If ever there was a partnership between two class-leading technologies that posed a superior alternative to VDI, it’s this one. Now, enterprises can seriously reevaluate the future role VDI will play in securing valuable IP and governing how developers work. The outcome could be a win for everyone.</p>

<h2>CDEs + Enterprise Browsers + Developers = Win-Win-Win</h2>

<p>Many enterprise development organizations still view VDI as a permanent fixture in their daily lives. The decision to reduce or replace VDI is non-trivial.</p>

<p>However, with a viable modern VDI alternative now available, the most progressive and innovative companies are already seizing the opportunity to extend their edge or close competitive gaps through a better developer experience.</p>

<p>For developers, this means a faster, more predictable development process. They can use modern technology specifically designed for development tasks rather than outdated VDI technology never intended for software development. This shift enhances their productivity and reduces frustration and unnecessary toil.</p>

<p>And the benefits don’t end with developers.</p>

<p>Platform and security teams maintain the governance and control that originally made VDI appealing without relying on VDI. They deliver an exceptional developer experience, which is always a top priority for platform engineering teams, and they can do this without drowning in a flood of VDI-related tickets.</p>

<p>Finally, CISOs and CIOs see a massive reduction in VDI licensing and overhead costs—in some cases, 90% or more. They optimize operations around driving innovation and growth rather than supporting cumbersome VDI systems. Faster onboarding of new developers and contractors also means a faster time to market and a significant competitive edge without introducing more risk.</p>

<p>If you want to preview a future without VDI, <a href="https://coder.com/demo">drop us a note</a>. We’re excited to share what the next-generation VDI alternative looks like and the opportunities it will unlock for your team.</p>


Developer experience has been an unintended casualty in organizations’ pursuit of security and governance. Learn how a modern alternative to legacy VDI is delivering a superior developer experience without sacrificing security.

Coder and Island.io offer an alternative to legacy VDI

CDEs + Enterprise Browsers: The Modern Alternative to VDI for Developers

<p>We&#39;ve officially established a monthly release schedule, and our latest release, Coder 2.11.0, includes several feature enhancements and bug fixes. For a complete summary of this release&#39;s updates, check out the <a href="https://github.com/coder/coder/releases/tag/v2.11.0" target="_blank">2.11.0 changelog</a> on GitHub.</p>

<h2>We formalized our monthly release schedule</h2>

<p>In case you missed it, we recently rolled out a monthly release schedule that allows you to upgrade directly to the newest <code>mainline</code> release or stick with the last <code>stable</code> release.</p>

<p>New versions of Coder are released on the <strong>first Tuesday of every month</strong> and include new features and enhancements. Patch releases, including bug fixes, will continue to be rolled out as needed throughout the month.</p>

<p>Coder Product Manager, Stephen Kirby, shared more information in his <a href="https://coder.com/blog/we-formalized-our-monthly-release-schedule" target="_blank">blog post</a> about our new release process. You can also <a href="https://coder.com/docs/v2/latest/install/releases" target="_blank">check out our documentation</a> to learn more.</p>

<h2>Other notable updates in 2.11.0</h2>

<h3>Sharable Ports</h3>

<p>We’re happy to bring the experimental Sharable Ports feature into general access. If you used Coder v1, this will be a familiar feature. Users can share services running on their Workspaces with other Coder users and the public through listening ports. The updated “ports” UI in your Workspaces dashboard can be used to configure this:</p>


<p>The “sharing level” of a port denotes its level of exposure, reflecting the same property of Coder Apps in our <a href="https://registry.terraform.io/providers/coder/coder/latest/docs/resources/app#share" target="_blank">Terraform provider</a>. Users can set the sharing level of ports to the following options:</p>

<ul>
<li>Owner (Default): Only exposes port to the Workspace owner</li>
<li>Authenticated: Exposes a port to all authenticated coder users on your deployment</li>
<li>Public: Allows anyone with the designated URL to access the port</li>
</ul>

<p>Owners with Enterprise licenses can enforce a maximum sharing level for Workspace ports in the template settings to prevent data exfiltration.</p>


<ul>
<li><a href="https://coder.com/docs/v2/latest/networking/port-forwarding#sharing-ports" target="_blank">Coder Documentation</a></li>
<li>GitHub Issue <a href="https://github.com/coder/coder/issues/11486" target="_blank">#11486</a></li>
</ul>

<h3>Control listening port protocols</h3>

<p>Now, any port exposed from a Coder Workspace has a configurable protocol (HTTP/HTTPS), regardless of whether or not it&#39;s shared. Previously, some HTTPS services were not accessible to browser and now they are!</p>

<ul>
<li><a href="https://coder.com/docs/v2/latest/networking/port-forwarding#configuring-port-protocol" target="_blank">Coder Documentation</a></li>
<li>GitHub Issue <a href="https://github.com/coder/coder/issues/12832" target="_blank">#12832</a></li>
</ul>

<h3>Require Terms of Service Acceptance</h3>

<p>Enforce Coder&#39;s default Terms of Service or your own custom Terms of Service, ensuring users agree to the terms before authenticating to your Coder deployment. By default, users are not required to accept Terms of Service.</p>

<ul>
<li><a href="https://coder.com/docs/v2/latest/cli/server#--terms-of-service-url" target="_blank">Coder Documentation</a></li>
<li>GitHub Issue <a href="https://github.com/coder/coder/issues/13068" target="_blank">#13068</a></li>
</ul>

<h2>Bug fixes</h2>

<h3>Signed Windows binaries</h3>

<p>Some issues have arisen, such as the Windows binary being flagged or VSCode being unable to download the CLI when accessing via our remote extension. Signing the binary resolves these issues.</p>

<ul>
<li>GitHub Issue <a href="https://github.com/coder/coder/issues/13086" target="_blank">#13086</a></li>
</ul>

<p>We release bug fixes and patches as needed throughout the month. Check out <a href="https://github.com/coder/coder/releases" target="_blank">Coder releases</a> on GitHub for full details on the latest patches.</p>

<p>Find a bug? <a href="https://github.com/coder/coder/issues" target="_blank">Tag it here</a> to let us know.</p>


This month, we rolled out several updates to Coder in 2.11.0. We also formalized our monthly release schedule.

What's new with Coder

Release Recap: Updated Release Schedule and 2.11.0

Matt is a product marketing manager specializing in developer tooling. With a background in design, development, and product management, he has worked in high-g

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