Rob Whiteley

CEO at Coder

I’m not seeing traditional venture rounds. As I talk to fellow CEOs, they report the same phenomenon: Customers coming off the investor sidelines and deploying their own capital into companies critical to their AI strategies. Why is that? 

Vision and conviction. 

Both worth more than any term sheet.

It’s why I’m proud to announce that <a href="https://coder.com/blog/90m-series-c-led-by-kkr-to-advance-secure-enterprise-ai-development">Coder closed our $90 million Series C</a>, led by one of our largest customers: KKR. Another large customer, QRT, participated. Uncork Capital (with us every round since the Seed!) and other existing investors rounded things out.

Coder Raises $90M Series C Led by KKR: Rob Whiteley on What's Next for AI Development Infrastructure

Sure, investors pitched me at tradeshows. I got the usual flurry of emails, calls, and LinkedIn messages. But KKR was different. Their CIO (that’s Chief Information Officer, not Investment) referred us to their Growth Equity team. Not because he&#39;d heard good things. Because he’d seen our value firsthand. Coder runs across his engineering org, used by more than 500 engineers. And now they want to deploy coding agents to thousands of employees — analysts, developers, operators, and more. 

The vision is to make AI agents accessible to all employees. The conviction is to do it with Coder.

<h2>The market signal investors are missing</h2>

Most venture capital firms I speak to chase the fastest-growing AI applications — companies compounding every quarter with ridiculous MRR growth. In my world, these vendors follow a similar pattern: Direct-to-developer SaaS with built-in generative AI (assistance or agents). The PLG dream! They’re rational bets in a moment like this. But it creates a selection bias: The VCs most excited about AI apps are often least interested in the infrastructure underneath them. Infrastructure doesn&#39;t 10x in a year. It compounds over decades.

The interesting signal in enterprise AI right now isn&#39;t coming from IDEs or vibe coding tools. It&#39;s coming from the engineering organizations actually deploying it — the ones asking not &quot;which AI tool is hottest&quot; but &quot;what breaks in our compliance posture if we let agents run freely.&quot; Those are the companies stress-testing infrastructure. Those are our customers.

Coder is experiencing tremendous growth. Our bookings are up 300% from this time last year – and that’s in durable, self-hosted enterprise deployments. But one stat caught the eye of our new customer-investors: 184% net dollar retention (trailing 12 months). Coder customers aren&#39;t just deploying, they&#39;re expanding. The product becomes embedded, <a href="https://coder.com/blog/how-abridge-scaled-developer-infrastructure-from-days-to-minutes">powering developer workflows</a> while silently scaling and transparently governing. And this only accelerates in the AI-native era. Data sovereignty, control, and repatriation are the new norm.

Our customers saw that story before most investors. So when KKR and QRT offered to participate in the round, the answer was straightforward. They were looking at their own engineering organizations and asking: what breaks if this goes away? That&#39;s a more durable question — and a more durable answer. It’s mutually assured success.

<h2>What enterprise AI development actually requires</h2>

KKR has thousands of developers and tens of thousands of employees who want to use AI tools. Before Coder, their engineering organization was fragmented — every developer with a different setup, a different environment, a different configuration. It’s difficult to collaborate and manage when humans are the only ones writing code. The moment you introduce AI coding agents, it stops being manageable and starts being a liability. It spirals when you look to do so beyond the four walls of engineering.

KKR&#39;s VP of AI, Cloud and Data put it simply: &quot;Coder is the safe mode for AI.&quot; If you want to run <a href="https://coder.com/blog/every-cursor-needs-a-coder">Claude Code, Cursor, or any autonomous coding agent</a> inside a large enterprise, you need:

<ul>
<li>Persistent, reproducible environments. </li>
<li>Carefully curated tools, skills, and repositories. </li>
<li>Audit trails, token tracking, and prompt observability. </li>
<li>Isolation from internet, search, and production systems. </li>
<li>Boundaries around what they can access and what they can do. </li>
<li>Agent-level identities, privileges, read/write access, and permissions. </li>
</ul>

None of that exists on a developer&#39;s laptop. None of it exists in a lightweight agent sandbox built for simple file reads and writes.

QRT arrived at the same conclusion from a different angle. Quantitative trading operates under strict regulatory requirements in <a href="https://coder.com/solutions/financial-services">financial services</a>. Moving fast and breaking things isn&#39;t an option for them. Moving fast with guardrails is. Coder gave them both: the speed to deploy AI workflows quickly, and the control to do it inside their own infrastructure. QRT keeps its trading analysts just as agile and safe as software engineers, using the same tools. 

Both KKR and QRT are democratizing coding. Wild times we live in!

<h2>The definition of &quot;developer&quot; changes</h2>

Developers are people, right? Specifically, software engineers. Nope, not any more. Low- and no-code technology brought us citizen developers. AI expands that definition further. The new definition of a developer is any builder with an idea. It could be a person, an autonomous agent, or a human-agent pair collaborating.This is what we see in KKR and QRT, and it will soon become commonplace across all enterprises.

Software engineers call the process and tools for coding the “inner loop”. You can (usually) trust these engineers to configure and run this inner loop on their laptops, but it’s a huge productivity drain. That’s why Coder exists. You cannot trust citizen developers, vibe coders, and agents. They simply don’t have the knowledge and skillset. 

The inner loop has to move off local machines and into governed workspaces. Not because the cloud is inherently better, but because non-engineers and agents can&#39;t run on laptops. Not successfully. They need the automation, performance, and governance of the cloud. And more importantly, they just need it to work. Asking every user to configure their own agentic environment is a recipe for failure at best and breaches at worst.

This is where Coder has built for years. We started as a developer productivity platform, giving engineering teams fast, consistent, self-hosted workspaces that run on any infrastructure, any cloud, any air-gapped environment. It’s exactly the right foundation for agentic development at scale. The same properties that make Coder great for people — reproducibility, <a href="https://coder.com/solutions/ai-governance">governance</a>, flexibility, self-hosting — are the properties that make it the right infrastructure layer for autonomous coding agents.

KKR calculated the total addressable market for this new layer and for this new audience. It’s 10 times what we&#39;d modeled internally. When you understand that every enterprise will deploy AI coding agents to every employee, that math makes sense.

<h2>A heartfelt “thank you”</h2>

I sincerely appreciate every Coder employee – past and present – who got us here. Every customer, <a href="https://coder.com/community">community member</a>, and <a href="https://coder.com/partners">partner</a> played a role. It’s all needed to support complex developer infrastructure in the biggest, gnarliest environments on the planet.

But when you raise a round, there is one population in your village that stands out. I want to thank Coder’s existing investors: Uncork Capital, Notable Capital, Redpoint Ventures, and Georgian Partners. They’ve shared our vision and conviction from the beginning. Adding KKR and QRT to the village only makes us stronger.

<h2>What comes next</h2>

Traditional VC firms will catch on. They will underwrite an entire cycle of <a href="https://coder.com/blog/ai-development-infrastructure-for-hybrid-human-and-agent-teams">AI development infrastructure</a> rounds. 

Until then, this round ensures our customers are ahead of that curve. It helps them build the next infrastructure stack that defines decades of competitive advantage.

AI development infrastructure defines the future of how software is built. We&#39;re grateful to KKR, QRT, and Uncork for sharing our vision and conviction. 

Now it’s your turn. Join us.

AI development infrastructure defines the future of how software is built. We're grateful to KKR, QRT, and Uncork for sharing our vision and conviction.

Coder's Customers Led Our Series C: What That Tells Me About AI

Coder’s Customers Led Our Series C: What That Tells Me About AI

The IDE is back in the spotlight of developer tools. For years it&#39;s been the quiet workhorse toiling away, with solutions like VS Code steadily improving the developer experience.

Then Cursor happened. Launched in late 2023, Cursor quickly gained traction among developers by embedding AI deeply into the development workflow. More than 100,000 developers adopted the tool within the first few months, drawn by features like conversational debugging and contextual code generation directly within the editor. Its rise underscores the first, big disruption in a market dominated by Microsoft, Apple, and Jetbrains.

And in the latest twist, <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/11/windsurfs-ceo-goes-to-google-openais-acquisition-falls-apart/">OpenAI&#39;s attempt to acquire Windsurf</a> — the closest alternative to Cursor — fell through. The same day OpenAI pulled out, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/google-to-pay-2-4-billion-in-deal-to-license-tech-of-coding-startup-hire-ceo-b9b94bbc">Google reached a licensing agreement for Windsurf’s technology valued at $2.4 billion, and hired its CEO and co-founder as researchers into DeepMind</a>. Then a whole three days went by before <a href="https://cognition.ai/blog/windsurf">the maker of Devin, Cognition, announced it acquired Windsurf’s remaining assets</a>, including its IP and engineering team. Besides entertaining tech drama, this acquisition underscores the start of a bigger trend.

But is this a secular trend, or just part of the AI disruption?

It&#39;s the latter. The IDE will not be the center of the developer universe. AI-powered editors like Cursor and Windsurf are a stop on the AI tour, not the destination.

The future is chatting with an agent. Here&#39;s why.

<h2>Two ways AI becomes native todeveloper workflows</h2>

Software development is a natural place for generative AI tools. Developers are tech-forward (albeit skeptical) and coding is deterministic. Meaning, if AI writes code and it compiles, then it “worked”. Other forms of content are harder to tell. I personally like AI-generated poems, but others don’t. 

We may debate the quality of the code, but we have build, test, CI/CD, and security systems to objectively evaluate it. That’s why we see AI adopted by nearly 80% of enterprise devs. 

It happens in two ways:

<h3>AI-powered editors</h3>

AI code completion and coding assistants integrated into IDEs have quickly become popular. Tools like GitHub Copilot and Cursor mentioned above enable developers to write code faster by suggesting improvements, documenting code, and offering context-aware insights. These significantly boost productivity, and require little to no change in developer behavior. But this phase will be short-lived as autonomous solutions emerge. This AI-assisted coding phase gives way to agentic AI.

<h3>Autonomous coding agents</h3>

Anthropic&#39;s Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, and Cursor Background Agents are the next evolution. Unlike AI editors, these complete complex coding tasks autonomously. 

Developers shift from writing code to parceling out tasks — or even whole projects — to their digital counterparts. A human remains in the loop, actively guiding the agents to generate and optimize code on their behalf. In this model, the developer’s role is to keep the agent on task, review its work, nudge it when it gets stuck, and suggest strategies its less experienced digital counterpart may not consider.

Chatting with an AI agent is quickly becoming the most intuitive way to interact with code. While IDEs still support chat interfaces, the necessity of using them as the conduit to agents diminishes. The developer workflow migrates away from the IDE as its central hub to dedicated agentic environments where conversations drive progress. IDEs remain relevant for code inspection, testing, and specialized tasks, but even this will fade as agent capabilities advance.

<h2>Code editors will go the way of word editors</h2>

Don&#39;t believe IDEs are going away? Consider how I use (or rather don&#39;t use) a word editor in my workflows. My content creation process is entirely automated. I do this by:

<ul>
<li>Opening a meeting tool like Zoom or Google Meet, where my spoken ideas are transcribed in real time.</li>
<li>Running the transcript through a series of custom GPTs: one extracts the structure and outline, another generates a full draft in my voice.</li>
<li>Passing the draft to a third GPT that acts as a developmental editor, sharpening and pushing it to a more refined piece.</li>
</ul>

The end result is a complete blog post — created without ever opening a traditional word editor. Sometimes I type in collaborative environments like ChatGPT&#39;s Canvas, but often this entire workflow is voice activated. And this gets even simpler once ChatGPT can handle long-lived voice sessions without blowing through its context window. That’s one chat interface end-to-end.

That unlocks meaningful automation. Imagine completing content creation — or coding — entirely through agentic workflows that execute tasks autonomously, only pausing when human guidance is required. This streamlined approach reflects the future of coding, where developers will guide agents — first by typing, but soon by just speaking — rather than code in an IDE.

So, if the IDE is going away, what will replace it? There are two agentic delivery methods.

<h3>Step 1 after IDEs: Vibe coding app builders</h3>

Emerging tools like <a href="https://bolt.new/">Stackblitz Bolt</a>, <a href="https://lovable.dev/">Lovable</a>, and <a href="https://v0.dev/">Vercel&#39;s v0</a> redefine development workflows by combining intuitive no-code interfaces, agentic AI, and hosting infrastructure. Rather than focusing on individual lines of code, developers use natural language with an agent and see instant previews of the app in their browser. Many will then host the app, ready for external users. Best practice is to perform varying levels of monitoring and engaging of the underlying coding agent’s workflow, but it’s not necessary. Full app building without the need for an IDE.

But there&#39;s a catch. It won&#39;t work in the enterprise.

<h3>Step 2 after IDEs: Embedded agents</h3>

The second — and enduring — category is embedded agents. Agents that can be tasked with coding from whatever chat interface is native to your developer workflow: Slack, GitHub comments, Jira, or Notion. Really anything with an MCP server becomes a natural extension of your autonomous coding agent.

This is the unlock for the enterprise. Now coding agents can be embedded in approved, proven enterprise platforms. Instant developer adoption. The agent runs from its own secure, governed infrastructure. Happy compliance teams. And <a href="https://coder.com/blog/launch-week-2025-hybrid-workflows">MCP-equipped tools</a> give the agent context so it can work on complex, real-world code bases. 

Here&#39;s a real world example: In this case, Coder&#39;s VP of Product, Ben Potter, starts a coding task in Slack. He tags our autonomous coding agent, <a href="https://blink.so/">Blink</a>, to create a GitHub issue. Our Head of Blink, Matt Vollmer, then jumps in asking Blink to refine the issue. Neither Ben nor Matt are software engineers. And everything is conveniently furled and linked.

The trippiest part? The issue is about Blink itself. Blink codes Blink. Although the bulk of Blink was authored by our very talented co-founder, Kyle Carberry, we can scale his development efforts with minimal human intervention. 

<img src="https://www.datocms-assets.com/19109/1752691387-blink-slack.png" style="max-width:95%" alt="Coder’s fully autonomous coding agent, Blink, collaborating with Coder teammates in Slack" />
Coder’s fully autonomous coding agent, Blink, collaborating with Coder teammates in Slack

<h2>Agentic AI is ready today: Get started</h2>

Developers will guide and refine AI-generated code rather than manually craft every line. This drives a shift from typed programming languages to spoken conversational languages. Developers just describe what they want so the agent can execute their intent. 

Agentic AI will be production-ready this year. The evolution from IDEs to agents is happening now. Those who embrace these tools in the next 12 to 18 months gain a competitive advantage. 

Terrifying or exciting? Probably both. You’ll need to jump in to find out. Learn how to <a href="https://coder.com/solutions">run agents in dedicated infrastructure using Coder</a>, or <a href="https://blink.so/">request access to Blink</a> for a fully embedded solution.

The IDE will not be the center of the developer universe. AI-powered editors like Cursor and Windsurf are a stop on the AI tour, not the destination. The future is chatting with an agent.

Is the IDE Dead? The Rise of Agentic AI in Software Development

Software development is changing. Fast.

AI coding agents are no longer a future concept. They’re here, writing real code, accelerating delivery, and reshaping workflows. But scaling agentic AI across an organization doesn’t just require new tools — it demands new infrastructure.

Today, Coder is unveiling a new brand that reflects our role in this shift. We are an <a href="http://www.coder.com/about">AI software development company</a>. Our mission is to make agentic AI a safe, trusted, and integral part of every software development lifecycle.

This is more than a visual refresh. It’s a statement of intent — and a preview of Coder’s next chapter.

<h2>From cloud dev environments to agentic infrastructure</h2>

Coder always helped enterprises like <a href="https://coder.com/success-stories/jbhunt">JB Hunt</a>, <a href="https://coder.com/success-stories/palantir">Palantir</a>, and <a href="https://coder.com/success-stories/dropbox">Dropbox</a> modernize development by moving workspaces to the cloud — securely, at scale, and without slowing down dev teams. Our self-hosted <a href="https://coder.com/cde">Cloud Development Environment (CDE)</a> gives platform teams the control they need while offering developers fast, flexible access to the tools they prefer.

In a world where human developers benefit from speed and choice, cloud environments are a growing option. But in an agentic world, it’s a requirement.

The frontier models validated this. OpenAI’s <a href="https://platform.openai.com/docs/codex#how-it-works">Codex</a> needs Docker infrastructure. <a href="https://blog.google/technology/google-labs/jules/">Jules</a> uses Google Cloud’s VM infrastructure. And Microsoft’s Copilot Agent uses GitHub Actions for dedicated containers or VMs. Put simply, agents need CDEs. 

This presents a significant challenge for large enterprises. Relying on proprietary cloud infrastructure poses risk, compliance, and reliability challenges. Agentic AI in the enterprise is a different beast.

That’s where Coder comes in.

Coder’s CDE is now the foundation for agentic development in the enterprise. It provides:

<ul>
<li>Ephemeral, isolated workspaces that spin up fast and shut down clean</li>
<li>Built-in policy enforcement to govern who (or what) can access code</li>
<li>Complete auditability of agent and developer activity</li>
<li>Toolchain flexibility, so devs and agents get first-class tooling</li>
<li>Enterprise-grade security and identity integration, for running in production</li>
</ul>

This approach enables developers to adopt AI at their own pace, with full visibility and control. Use basic GenAI as a developer assistant. Work in AI-powered IDEs as virtual pair programmers. Or farm out tasks to fully autonomous agents functioning as your peer software engineer. Developers get the best developer experience to drive productivity. And platform and security teams gain the confidence to manage both human and AI contributions in one cohesive system — no shadow tools, no sprawl, no compromises.

Coder launch July 7

<h2>Coming July 2025: The future of enterprise software development</h2>

In July, we’re launching a major update designed for the realities of AI-assisted development.
This release introduces agent-aware controls that extend our CDE’s capabilities. You’ll be able to:

<ul>
<li>Provision environments where AI agents and humans work side by side</li>
<li>Define scope and permissions for each agent, tailored to the task</li>
<li>Monitor and audit AI-generated changes like any other team member</li>
<li>Enforce security and compliance policies — automatically</li>
</ul>

For organizations experimenting with autonomous coding or preparing for large-scale AI adoption, this is a turning point. You get the velocity of agentic workflows with the guardrails of enterprise infrastructure.

<h2>Why it matters now</h2>

We’re seeing a new hybrid team emerge: developers collaborating with agents for code generation, refactoring, documentation, testing, and beyond. But without secure, standardized environments, this hybrid model can introduce more risk than reward.

Coder solves this by offering structure without friction:

<ul>
<li>Developers stay productive with familiar tools</li>
<li>Agents operate within well-defined boundaries</li>
<li>Platform teams retain visibility and control across every workspace</li>
</ul>

It’s how enterprises can move from pilot projects to production-grade AI development — safely, confidently, and at scale.

<h2>Join us for Launch Week</h2>

To mark this evolution, we’re hosting Launch Week in July — a series of live sessions, technical deep-dives, and product demos for engineering leaders, platform teams, and anyone navigating the AI shift in software development.

You’ll get:

<ul>
<li>A full walkthrough of our July platform release</li>
<li>First looks at new agent-aware workspace capabilities</li>
<li>Best practices for building and governing AI-augmented workflows</li>
<li>And much more!</li>
</ul>

<a href="https://launch.coder.com">Reserve your spot now</a>

This is your front-row seat to the next chapter in enterprise development where agentic AI and developer experience go hand in hand.

Making agentic AI a safe, trusted, and integral part of every software development lifecycle

Coder is Open To Build: The Infrastructure for Autonomous Coding

Software development can&#39;t be bogged down by outdated tools and inefficient workflows. Developers and technology leaders alike expect speed, flexibility, and seamless collaboration.

Three major trends are driving this transformation:

<ul>
<li>The lasting impact of remote and hybrid work on developer productivity</li>
<li>The widespread adoption of multi-cloud environments</li>
<li>The rise of generative AI in software development</li>
</ul>

These shifts reshape how software moves from an idea to a finished product. They demand a development stack that prioritizes speed, security, and flexibility. Businesses adopting this emerging developer stack will build faster, reduce friction, and outpace the competition.

To better understand how you can take advantage, Coder released its <a href="https://coder.com/ebooks-and-reports/reports/state-of-development-environments-2025">State of Development Environments 2025 report</a>. We use the data in the report to dive into why these trends matter, detail what the new developer stack looks like, and summarize how it will benefit you.

<h2>Why we need a new approach for developers</h2>

<h3>Remote and hybrid work exposed inefficiencies</h3>

Traditional development workflows weren’t built for a distributed workforce. Outdated VPNs, disjointed tools, and sluggish communication slowed development. As burnout and turnover increased, companies had to rethink how they support their developers.

Developers need instant access to their environments without battling VPNs or waiting on slow provisioning. Yet, long setup times remain a challenge—only 7% of organizations can create environments in under an hour, while 21% take more than two days. Despite this, only 14% of organizations prioritize reducing these setup times, creating a critical inefficiency in development.

Teams need visibility into workflow bottlenecks without intrusive monitoring. And businesses must ensure security and compliance without adding more complexity. The old way of working simply doesn&#39;t scale.

<h3>Multi-cloud is the new reality</h3>

Enterprises no longer rely on a single cloud provider. They mix and match services to control costs, improve reliability, and take advantage of best-in-class tools. But this flexibility comes at a cost—development across multiple clouds introduces complexity. While multi-cloud offers flexibility, it also introduces inefficiencies that slow development.

Each platform has different configurations, security policies, and integrations, making it harder for developers to work efficiently. Developers spend too much time adapting to different environments. Security teams struggle to maintain visibility across platforms. And companies risk losing the speed and agility that multi-cloud was meant to provide in the first place.

<h3>Generative AI is redefining development</h3>

AI isn’t just an enhancement—it’s transforming how software is built. Developers now rely on AI-powered tools to write, debug, and optimize code faster than ever. Even non-developers can contribute through natural language interfaces, lowering the barrier to entry and increasing collaboration. These no-code app builders allow anyone to prototype ideas quickly, making it easier to test concepts before committing to full-scale development.

But this shift brings new challenges. Teams must adapt to AI-assisted workflows, ensuring code quality and security without slowing down innovation. The traditional development process wasn’t built for this level of automation. To fully unlock AI’s potential, a new developer stack is required—one that integrates AI seamlessly while maintaining control and reliability.

<h2>How the AI-native developer stack works</h2>

A new pattern is emerging—one that removes friction from development, simplifies cloud complexity, and enhances security without slowing teams down. The new developer stack consists of two core components that embrace AI natively: developer tools that streamline ideation and development, and cloud tools that provide secure, scalable infrastructure.

<h3>Developer tools: From ideation to development</h3>

Developers need a faster way to move from idea to production. The AI-native developer stack introduces three critical coding tools:

<ul>
<li>No-code app builders – Platforms like bolt.new let developers – and soon, anyone – mock up ideas before committing to full development. Instead of starting in an IDE, anyone can quickly prototype, test early concepts, and validate ideas.</li>
<li>AI-powered IDEs – Developers can transition from prototyping in a no-code environment to an AI-enhanced IDE. Tools like Cursor assist with coding, debugging, and refactoring, making full-scale development more efficient.</li>
<li>Secure browsers – Platforms like <a href="https://coder.com/datasheets/a-modern-secure-alternative-to-vdi-for-developers-coder-island-partnership">Island</a> provide built-in security like data leak prevention and device integrity checks while allowing access to development tools like Jira and Slack.</li>
</ul>

This combination allows for rapid iteration and ensures that developers only invest in writing production code after testing their ideas.

<h3>Cloud tools: Maintaining a consistent, secure environment</h3>

We found 73% of developers need approval to deploy a new tool. Another 14% cannot choose at all. In the AI-native developer stack, surrounding infrastructure tools make coding faster, <a href="https://coder.com/solutions/security">more secure</a>, and more efficient by enabling tool choice.

<ul>
<li><a href="https://coder.com/cde">Cloud Development Environments (CDEs)</a> – Solutions like Coder reduce local setup time by offering on-demand, pre-configured environments to handle cloud infrastructure, libraries, and plugins.</li>
<li>Internal Developer Portals (IDPs) – The ever-popular <a href="https://coder.com/cde/backstage">Backstage project</a> act as a central hub, enabling self-service for developers to connect to repositories, services, and tools in one place.</li>
<li>Developer Experience (DevEx) Monitoring – Tools like <a href="https://getdx.com/">DX</a> provide real-time insights independent of the developer stack to measure <a href="https://coder.com/solutions/productivity">productivity</a> regardless of local, cloud, or hybrid environments.</li>
</ul>

Integrating these tools focuses developers on writing code instead of managing configurations, environments, and access. Visibility across the entire development workflow helps identify bottlenecks, improve efficiency, and ensure a seamless developer experience.

<h2>The benefits of the AI-native developer stack</h2>

We found that 35% of respondents cited virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) as still being the organization standard for developers. But ask any developer and they will shake their fist in the air, cursing their VDI. Adopting this modern developer stack isn’t just about efficiency—it gives developers the tools they need to build better software, faster. 

Companies that make the shift gain key advantages:

<ul>
<li>Seamless developer experience – No setup delays, no access headaches, and just instant prototyping and coding.</li>
<li>Stronger security and compliance – Secure browsers and centralized CDEs reduce exposure to security risks.</li>
<li>Faster software delivery – Less friction means more time spent building and shipping versus battling tools.</li>
<li>Lower operational costs – Eliminating VPNs, VDIs, and manual provisioning reduces infrastructure overhead.</li>
<li>Future-proof flexibility – As AI, multi-cloud, and development tools evolve, this stack adapts without disruption.</li>
</ul>

With 78% of organizations planning to standardize their development environments in the next year, the shift is already underway. However, confusion persists—while 79% of respondents report using fully managed cloud-hosted environments (CDEs), half have a limited understanding of their technical features. It&#39;s time to close the gap. It&#39;s time to rearchitect the stack.

<h2>Deploy the AI-native developer stack today</h2>

This developer stack isn’t on the horizon—it’s here. No-code prototyping, AI-powered development, and cloud-based infrastructure move teams from idea to production in minutes. They build AI into the developer workflow, as well as use it internally to automate operations.

At Coder, we’ve integrated with Cursor, Island, Backstage, and DX to help teams deploy this architecture today. Get started today—visit <a href="https://github.com/coder">github.com/coder</a> or <a href="https://coder.com/demo">contact us to implement the AI-native stack in your organization</a>.

This developer stack isn’t on the horizon—it’s here. No-code prototyping, AI-powered development, and cloud-based infrastructure move teams from idea to production in minutes. 

The AI-Native Developer Stack: Rethinking Code From Ideation To Production In Minutes

Eight years ago, we set out to make Cloud Development Environments (CDEs) practical for organizations across industries. Today, Coder is used by some of the largest U.S. investment banks, intelligence agencies, and global SaaS providers, cutting onboarding times, protecting code from theft, and improving collaboration.

Now, Gartner® has released a definitive market overview on the role of CDEs and their future. <a href="https://coder.com/ebooks-and-reports/reports/market-guidance-on-the-benefits-of-cdes">The 2024 Market Guide for Cloud Development Environments</a> explains what CDEs are, why they’re growing in popularity, and why IT leaders should take notice.

Gartner notes: “AI engineering and cloud-native development workflow complexity make it hard to improve developer productivity, streamline the onboarding experience and secure the software supply chain. Software engineering leaders can use cloud development environments to address these challenges for their teams.” 

We agree. Developers do their best work when they’re enjoying their coding experience, using familiar tools without friction. A centralized development environment makes collaboration easier and keeps code secure.

The CDE Market Today

Gartner states that the CDE market is still in its early stages, having penetrated less than 5% of its potential target audience. They estimate that it may take another five to 10 years to reach mainstream use.

As with any major technology shift, adoption takes time—but momentum is building. According to a <a href="https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2024-05-16-gartner-identifies-the-top-five-strategic-technology-trends-in-software-engineering-for-2024">Gartner Peer Community Survey</a>, 59% of respondents plan to phase out local workstations in favor of CDEs, while 12% say they have already done it. An industry-level analysis of the same survey shows that the percentages are higher in specific verticals — 67% in banking, finance and insurance, 60% in healthcare, 67% in retail, 63% in manufacturing and 70% in professional services plan to adopt CDEs. 

Gartner identified three primary value drivers for adopting CDEs: productivity, security and support for multiple personas.

Productivity

Gartner cites productivity improvements as “the biggest driving factor for the adoption of CDEs.” Gartner’s Software Engineering Survey for 2024 revealed that 36% of software engineering leaders have seen CDEs increase developer productivity in their organizations. 

CDEs reduce time spent on setup, onboarding, and switching between development environments. —long enough for a developer to forget why they were hired in the first place. A configured CDE, on the other hand, gets them coding in minutes.

For leadership, this is a priority. Less time wasted on non-coding tasks leaves more focus time for developers to create the new apps and services that drive business growth. Developers spend more time on work they enjoy, improving retention.

Security

Securing code is a top concern for C-level executives, who worry about IP theft and compliance violations. CDEs improve security by centralizing control, enforcing policies without adding extra work for developers. IT teams can enforce consistent security policies, while developers access vetted tools, reducing shadow IT and unapproved open-source software usage.

Security is already a deciding factor for some teams. According to <a href="https://coder.com/ebooks-and-reports/reports/market-guidance-on-the-benefits-of-cdes">the State of Development Environments 2025 report</a>, security and compliance concerns are among the biggest challenges administrators face, with 25% citing them as a primary obstacle. Additionally, approval bottlenecks—often tied to security considerations—were a major challenge for both developers (21%) and administrators (24%), highlighting the need for environments that balance security with accessibility.

Support for multiple personas

CDEs provide a central repository for tools and resources, enabling multiple personas to securely collaborate and share data. Since the environments are centralized, developers get remote access to specialized hardware (e.g., GPUs, sensors, etc.) in a cost-effective manner, and minimize the need for the organization to purchase laptops with high-end specifications. Platform Engineering teams can use CDEs to easily manage software dependencies, and data scientists can access large datasets and computing power for training ML models.

The road ahead

CDEs are still gaining traction, but organizations are seeing their value now. They’re removing the friction from developers’ experience, strengthening security, and a broader range of users across teams.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Gartner, Market Guide for Cloud Development Environments, Manjunath Bhat, Thomas Murphy, 18 September 2024

GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.This graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document. The Gartner document is available upon request from Coder.

Gartner®’s 2024 Market Guide for Cloud Development Environments highlights the growing adoption of CDEs, with 59% of organizations planning to phase out local workstations to improve productivity, security, and onboarding.

Why CDEs Should Be on IT Leaders' Agendas

Why CDEs Should Be on IT Leaders' Agendas: Insights from the New Gartner Market Guide

We’re back from AWS re:Invent 2024 in Las Vegas. What a conference! We gave demos, hosted a technical session, and sponsored social events. It was great to connect with partners, investors, and customers in person. 

It’s a big event, about 60,000 people attended this year. That led us to plenty of conversations with architecture and DevOps leaders, dev teams, decision-makers, and AWS customers. We learned new things and confirmed what we already knew about trends in cloud-native software development. Here’s our report on what we saw and heard.

<h2>A stronger partner ecosystem</h2>

With the economy bouncing back, we’re hearing that enterprise organizations are spending more and investor activity is increasing. Expect to see high profile IPOs in the new year. 

AWS recognizes this with a sharp focus on growth from their technology ecosystem. They’re committing to this in a few ways:

<ul>
<li>Big <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/partners/programs/isv-accelerate/">updates</a> to their co-selling program that will supercharge how their sales and product teams collaborate with their ecosystem partners</li>
<li>AWS is also staying out of the way with recent retirements of 1st-party products, including Cloud9, CodeCommit, and CloudSearch. 
AWS services partners we talked to reported similar trends, noting that cloud migration and modernization initiatives remain major drivers for AWS.</li>
</ul>

At re:Invent 2024 specifically, we saw the outcome of this strategy with many partner products appearing in sessions run by AWS teams. We were flattered to hear that an AWS Solution Architect ran a demo from inside a Coder workspace.

<h2>The next steps for AI in software development</h2>

We heard this a lot in our conversations about generative AI: it’s no longer if developers should invest in AI tools, but how to do it effectively.

There’s a clear “day 2” problem with code-assistance GenAI tools. On day 1, everyone is excited for the new technology. Selecting, implementing, and initial usage show great promise. Then utilization drops off as fear, security concerns, and inertia take hold, fueled by developer frustration that the tools don’t deliver as expected. 

This is an expected challenge for early adopters of disruptive, new technology. Training, monitoring, and provisioning efforts are needed to push through the lull. The good news is that developer tools are evolving with more intuitive, productive ways to apply GenAI. 

<h2>The flexibility of self-managed development environments</h2>

Coder strongly believes that a big feature of cloud-native platforms is flexibility. So we weren’t surprised to see self-hosted and self-managed development environments getting attention from a broader audience. 

Self-hosting used to appeal to security-conscious organizations that were worried about auditing, compliance, and data sovereignty issues with SaaS offerings. Now we’re seeing how modern solutions leverage infrastructure as code (IaC), FinOps, and GenAI-powered automation to enable companies that previously didn’t have the skillset or capacity to manage their own cloud infrastructure. For example, organizations face challenges in managing numerous contractors and ensuring their workspaces are efficiently handled once projects are completed.

Our VP of Product, Ben Potter, gave a talk at AWS re: Invent about the enterprise developer environment, the challenges we are running into, and what to do. Watch the entire presentation <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TfsEipwf6tY">here</a>. 

<h2>The evolving developer stack</h2>

There is a new developer stack emerging, a new generation that seamlessly integrates cloud-native solutions. This is consistent with the increased general awareness of CDEs this year compared to last. 

On the backend we see CDEs joining git repositories and CI/CD for cloud-based development. On the developer side we see growing demand for CDEs to deploy modern, GenAI powered IDEs like <a href="https://www.cursor.com/">Cursor</a>. Secure browsers like <a href="https://coder.com/blog/the-modern-alternative-to-vdi-key-takeaways-from-our-october-webinar">Island</a> round out the device side by replacing previous-generation solutions like VDI. 

<h2>DevEx is the whole point</h2>

Our own customers told us how they are more focused on keeping their current teams in place and making them more productive with better developer experience, rather than adding headcount. Of course, self-service and flexibility in cloud providers have always landed well with platform engineers. Now they have new, better DevEx tools to support and track developer productivity, while FinOps solutions ensure efficient cloud spend.

Coder has been cloud-native from the beginning, so it’s ready to integrate with all these technologies. Coder’s flexibility and focus on developer experience, like multiple workspaces and using IDE and cloud of choice, landed well with the developers we demo’d to. The result we’ve <a href="https://coder.com/success-stories">seen many times</a> is happier, more productive developers and infrastructure that costs significantly less than traditional, local-centric developer stacks.

<h2>Conclusion</h2>

We had a fantastic time at AWS re:Invent 2024. Thanks for helping us make this event a success!

We’re encouraged that AWS is looking to their partner ecosystem for innovation and by new trends in cloud software development, which bring tighter integration of technologies like GenAI into the developer’s world.
What’s next for Coder? We’ll continue to invest in solutions like <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/prodview-zaoq7tiogkxhc?sr=0-2&ref_=beagle&applicationId=AWSMPContessa">Coder on AWS Marketplace</a> to accelerate development workflows. 

2025 will be exciting! Stay tuned!

AWS re:Invent 2024 was full of insights into the future of cloud-native software development. In this blog, we share key takeaways from Coder’s participation, including the growing importance of AI in development, the evolving developer stack, and AWS’s enhanced partner ecosystem. 

AWS blog header

What happened in Vegas

I am thrilled to announce Coder raised $35 million in fresh capital, bringing our Series B total to $65M. This marks a significant step forward in our mission to make developers 10x more productive, and underscores our commitment to empowering the global developer community. I’m extremely proud of the Coder team for hitting this huge milestone.

<h2>Transforming How Developers Stay in the Flow</h2>

Today’s development environments are evolving rapidly. Developers traditionally built, shipped, and ran their code in the cloud, yet relied on their local machines to write that code. That’s changing. The need for the automation and elasticity of the cloud, specialized resources like GPUs, and proximity to large data sets is shifting developers to write code natively in the cloud. How? With a set of kludgy cloud IDEs or homegrown workspace infrastructure. It doesn’t scale, and it’s not secure. This is where cloud development environments (CDE) – and Coder in particular – come in. 

Why? Consider these <a href="https://coder.com/success-stories/skai">impressive results published just last week by Skai</a>:

Skai is not alone. 

In its latest <a href="https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2023-08-16-gartner-places-generative-ai-on-the-peak-of-inflated-expectations-on-the-2023-hype-cycle-for-emerging-technologies">Hype Cycle™</a>, Gartner® projects that CDEs will offer high value and reach mainstream adoption in five to 10 years, predicting that “by 2026, 60% of cloud workloads will be built and deployed using CDEs.”

CDEs enable developers to write code directly in the cloud—whether on-premises, private, or public. This shift leverages the power, security, and scalability of the cloud to enhance developer productivity.

The market is evolving. There’s already a first generation of CDEs that fail to deliver on several fundamental enterprise prerequisites, including low latency, high availability, and absolute control over where development environments are hosted. CDEs should be the center of developer experience, enhancing productivity and security. The shortcomings of the “OG” CDEs are opening the door for Coder to redefine the standards and drive the next generation of CDEs. Ones that are purpose-built to meet the demands of today’s cloud-native enterprises.

But we can do more. We can do better. That’s why we raised another $35M. Coder is doubling down on CDEs to take the next step in our mission of making developers 10x more productive. Our goal has always been to keep developers in flow.

<h2>Accelerating Our Strategy by Adding Georgian to the Mix</h2>

To accelerate our strategy, we partnered with <a href="https://georgian.io/">Georgian</a>, a venture capital firm with deep expertise in developer tooling, open source, and generative AI. Georgian led our Series B2 round, with additional contributions from existing investors <a href="https://notablecap.com/">Notable</a>, <a href="https://www.redpoint.com/">Redpoint</a>, and <a href="https://uncorkcapital.com/">Uncork</a>. Georgian’s Russel Moore will join our Board of Directors, bringing valuable insights and experience from other Georgian portfolio companies like <a href="http://Island.io">Island</a> and <a href="https://dagster.io/">Dagster</a>.

We’re honored to have Georgian on the team and will put the new capital to work immediately to accelerate our journey, starting with more investment in open source, extensibility, and global reach.

<h2>Extending Our OSS Foundation with a Dedicated Developer Experience Team</h2>

Developers are the backbone of digital businesses. They create future services that attract, retain, and support customers. With more than 80K GitHub stars across all of our open-source projects, Coder has built a thriving developer community. We will invest more to make it even better, adding resources to support adoption and contributions to our open-source projects. Core to this is a new Developer Experience function dedicated to overseeing and growing our community, which already includes over 1.2 million monthly active users. I’m looking forward to seeing how our community continues to make Coder an integral part of the modern developer stack. 

<h2>Enhancing the Capabilities of a CDE with Better Insights and GenAI Support</h2>

We believe Coder makes the best enterprise CDE. But as discussed, this market is evolving rapidly. It’s not enough to simply provide a faster, more secure development environment in any cloud. That’s table stakes. We are investing in new developer insights capabilities to help both Developers and Platform teams create more efficient development environments. And stay tuned for an exciting evolution of our ephemeral workspaces that will make it easier for developers to spin up and manage multiple GenAI-powered workspaces. These are only two of many core areas we’re investing in to reimagine what a CDE looks like. Stay tuned to the <a href="https://www.coder.com/roadmap">Coder roadmap</a> to learn more.

<h2>Expanding Our Global Reach, Starting with Europe</h2>

Over the past year, we have listened and learned from our customers. Europe has a unique set of security, compliance, and data sovereignty requirements that Coder solves. Currently, more than 25% of our demand comes from European enterprises. To capitalize on this demand and better serve our current customers in Europe, Coder will expand its operations in 2025. We will establish a European point of presence to accelerate the hiring of local staff across our support, engineering, sales, and marketing teams. 

<h2>Thank You — And Join Us!</h2>

As we embark on this next chapter, I want to extend my heartfelt thanks to our investors, employees, partners, and most importantly, our developer community. Your support and dedication inspire us every day to push the boundaries of what’s possible in cloud development.

Are you inspired? If so, <a href="https://www.coder.com/careers">join us</a>! We’ll be hiring rapidly over the next 12 to 18 months. We’d love to have you develop, support, or bring to market the next great idea in developer productivity.

Announcing Coder's Series B2 Funding, bringing our Series B total to $65M.

Funding B2 header

Coder Raises $35M to Accelerate the Cloud Development Environment Market with Extended Open Source, Enhanced CDE Capabilities, and Expanded Global Reach

Cloud Development Environments (CDEs) are transforming fast-moving, entrepreneurial organizations. Their use cases are skyrocketing. For those developers and IT teams that are accustomed to on-prem project work and onboarding, the rise in popularity of CDEs have offered an immediate improvement to productivity, task management, and security.

CDEs are growing in popularity, but don’t take our word for it! In August, Gartner included CDEs as a technology to watch in its <a href="https://coder.com/blog/cdes-are-going-to-live-up-to-the-hype">Hype Cycle™ for Emerging Technologies</a>, and noted in a new report, Top 5 Strategic Technology Trends in Software Engineering for 2024 that by 2027, 40% of organizations in highly regulated verticals will mandate cloud development environments. That’s up from less than 10% in 2024.

In the report, <a href="https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2024-05-16-gartner-identifies-the-top-five-strategic-technology-trends-in-software-engineering-for-2024">Top 5 Strategic Technology Trends in Software Engineering for 2024</a>, Gartner states that, “investments in disruptive technologies can empower software engineering teams to meet business objectives for productivity, sustainability and growth. This research highlights the top five technology trends that software engineering leaders must track and act on in 2024 and beyond.”

CDE Gartner

Key Drivers Behind CDE Adoption:

<ul>
<li>Software supply chain attacks are on the rise. Local development environments are a security risk. Security teams can centrally manage, govern, and secure cloud development environments to minimize the threat. Cloud development environments also make it easier to support and secure personally owned devices.</li>
<li>The automation of DevOps workflows introduces more complexity. With the addition of numerous plug-ins, extensions and API integrations, updating and configuring local machines has become cumbersome and unreliable. Cloud development environments seamlessly integrate with Git-based repositories and continuous integration/continuous delivery tools.</li>
<li>Modern applications require modern development solutions. Mesh services, event-driven apps, and Kubernetes applications are difficult to develop and test on local machines. Cloud development environments provide custom preconfigured hardware to support specific application architectures.</li>
</ul>

At Coder, we believe the benefits of CDEs are improving developer experience, while also giving developers a secure, productive cloud environment to not only achieve flow state, but giving IT leaders peace of mind for employee onboarding and project management. 

For example, <a href="https://blog.palantir.com/the-benefits-of-remote-ephemeral-workspaces-1a1251ed6e53">Palantir</a> exemplifies this shift—moving coding to the cloud in 2022. Coder ended up giving them the flexibility and leverage they needed to manage complex development setups, control costs, and improve developer experience. The team was able to <a href="https://www.palantir.com/">explore ways</a> to implement an ephemeral remote workplace model to solve a number of complexities in its development processes early on. Building large, complex software products required heavy compute resources, and “configuration drift” was creating more instances where developers shrug and say, “it works on my machine.” Onboarding was a time-consuming process for both new hires and developers moving from project to project. 

Organizations can take multiple routes when encountering these issues – from buying more powerful laptops, to shifting development infrastructure to SaaS platforms. However, this is where CDEs can solve a multitude of problems at once and can pay dividends.

CDEs create faster development cycles, sped up download times, reduced need for onboarding and support, and a clear path for more external contributions. Since the workspaces live right next to the code repository and artifact servers, download times and request latency decrease considerably. For Palantir, the dedicated development infrastructure teams debugged fewer issues on local machines, allowing teams to spend more time focused on optimizing developer tooling. Creating an easier path to development environments, teams were also able to easily contribute to each other’s codebases.

The other four trends in the report are well known:

<ul>
<li>AI-augmented development promises to boost developer productivity, control costs, and improve their teams’ ability to deliver more value;</li>
<li>Software engineering intelligence provides visibility into teams’ use of time and resources, operational effectiveness, and progress on business objectives;</li>
<li>Green software engineering initiatives can advance organizations’ sustainability objectives and reduce the carbon footprint of building digital products;</li>
<li>And platform engineering projects reduce complexity via scalable, self-service platforms, which will improve developer experience and developer productivity.</li>
</ul>

Overall, CDEs have arrived. They’re generating tangible benefits for organizations like Palantir Technologies, which was aggressive enough to change their models, and they’re on the short list of agenda items software engineering teams will tackle in 2024.

Top 5 stretegic tech treds Gartner

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Gartner, Gartner Press Release, “Gartner Identifies the Top Five Strategic Technology Trends in Software Engineering for 2024” May 16, 2024, <a href="https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2024-05-16-gartner-identifies-the-top-five-strategic-technology-trends-in-software-engineering-for-2024">https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2024-05-16-gartner-identifies-the-top-five-strategic-technology-trends-in-software-engineering-for-2024</a>
Gartner, Top 5 Strategic Technology Trends in Software Engineering for 2024, Joachim Herschmann, Manjunath Bhat, et al, 15 May 2024
Gartner, Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies, 2023, Arun Chandrasekaran, Melissa Davis, 2 August 2023 GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally, and HYPE CYCLE is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

In the report, Gartner recognizes CDEs as one of the top five technology trends that software engineering leaders must act on in 2024 and beyond! 

Gartner Top 5 strategic tech trends in software eng report

Why CDEs are One of the trends included in Gartner® report, Top 5 Strategic Technology Trends in Software Engineering for 2024

If you’re a software developer trying to convince your organization to adopt a Cloud Development Environment (CDE), there are plenty of good points to argue. We’ve outlined a few of them throughout this blog series, summarizing Coder’s recently-released <a href="https://coder.com/ebooks-and-reports/reports/cde-adoption-report">Cloud Development Environment Adoption Report</a>.

One argument is how CDEs <a href="https://coder.com/blog/cde-adoption-report-cloud-development-environments-the-next-frontier-of-programmi">simplify and optimize the onboarding process</a>. The largest percentage of respondents in our survey of developers and business leaders listed this as a top benefit CDEs provide.

CDEs also <a href="https://coder.com/blog/cdes-provide-security-benefits-to-both-organizations-and-developers">keep companies’ code secure</a>. In the survey, security was the #1 consideration when selecting tools, with 43.9% of respondents indicating it as a key feature when selecting CDEs.

Third, <a href="https://coder.com/blog/cdes-offering-improved-developer-productivity-and-experience">CDEs improve the developer experience</a>. Developers using licensed CDEs reported a 15% higher score in overall quality of work life than developers in conventional environments.

While each of these arguments should hold sway with specific decision-makers within an organization, there’s a fourth point that certainly should catch the ear of stakeholders in charge of budgets: CDEs make economic sense.
In the CDE Adoption Report, we calculated some of the expected time and cost savings CDEs provide based on data culled from our survey.
Some of the biggest chunks of savings start with the time organizations can get back during the process of onboarding developers and contractors when they first start work or change projects.

In conventional enterprise environments, it can take weeks to get developers up and running. With CDEs, all the development tools, services, and infrastructure developers need can be made accessible through a web browser, or connecting through an extension on your local IDE. With a configured CDE, IT departments can give developers a URL and have them sign on. This cuts the onboarding time down to minutes.

Assuming that developers compose about 35.4% of an average staff and take, on average, 80 hours of time to first commit, organizations with 2,000 employees can save nearly $2 million in onboarding costs. Savings for organizations with 10,000 employees swell up to nearly $10 million.

However, onboarding-specific savings don’t stop there. Once developers are onboarded to development environments, they still need to be given access to new tools and new projects on an ongoing basis. CDEs shorten the onboarding time for these tasks, simultaneously removing the hassle of constant tool switching in and out of development platforms since all of the tools are hosted in the same cloud environment.

To break it down with dollar amounts, if each developer saved two hours each week on improved build times and reduced tool maintenance, an organization with 2,000 employees and 700 developers would gain back more than 70,000 hours of development time and over $5 million annually based on time saved in developer salaries. A larger organization with 3,500 developers would net out savings of more than $25.5 million per year.

Moving development into the cloud generates many other benefits for organizations. It makes development easier to troubleshoot, improves accessibility, provides more flexibility in tool choices, ensures compatibility with production and staging environments, and reduces “drift” in development configurations.

Each of these contributes to an overall improvement in developer experience and software quality. Each can stand as a strong argument for making CDEs a part of an organization’s culture.

But behind it all is the issue of dollars and cents. Money talks – and it’s talking loudly in favor of CDEs.

To dive deeper into the world of CDEs, get up to speed with the rest of the blogs in our CDE Adoption Report blog series:

<ul>
<li><a href="https://coder.com/blog/cde-adoption-report-cloud-development-environments-the-next-frontier-of-programmi">Cloud Development Environments: The Next Frontier of Programming Productivity</a></li>
<li><a href="https://coder.com/blog/cdes-offering-improved-developer-productivity-and-experience">CDEs: Offering Improved Developer Productivity and Experience</a></li>
<li><a href="https://coder.com/blog/cdes-provide-security-benefits-to-both-organizations-and-developers">CDEs Provide Security Benefits to Both Organizations and Developers</a></li>
<li><a href="https://coder.com/blog/kubecon-eu-2024-cde-implementation-is-on-the-rise-and-people-love-open-source">KubeCon EU 2024: CDE Implementation is on the Rise, and People Love Open Source</a> </li>
</ul>

In the fifth and last accompanying blog to our CDE Adoption Report, we recap the findings and dive into the cost savings for using CDEs. 

The Dollars  and Cents Argument  for CDEs

The Dollars and Cents Argument for CDEs

While many developers may think of Cloud Development Environments primarily as productivity tools, they bring tangible benefits for security and compliance – to both organizations and developers themselves.

In a survey we conducted for Coder’s recent Cloud Adoption Report, we asked developers why they rejected CDE products in the past, and five out of 10 tools were most frequently rejected due to a lack of security features. Overall, security was the #1 consideration when selecting tools, with 43.9% of respondents indicating it as a key feature when selecting CDEs.

However, CDEs actually ease organizations’ security concerns. With a CDE, IT eliminates the ability for anybody to download source code; no one can copy the files out into a separate environment, and there’s no way for them to download the content. The only thing they see is the Integrated Development Environment that’s running on a cloud instance. They can see and work on the code, but they can’t pull that code out and put it on a device IT doesn’t control.

<h2>Removing the ‘Shift Left Tax’</h2>

For developers themselves, CDEs remove a lot of the hassle that comes with having to manage organizations’ security policies in their own environments. Some in the industry refer to this as an element in the “Shift Left Tax” – extra work imposed on them by organizational moves to integrate testing and quality control early in the development process.

In conventional coding environments, developers have to configure their own settings to authenticate tokens, keep antivirus tools up to date and manage mobile devices to comply with organizational regulations. The information is usually on FAQ documents, intranets or checklists, and it all has to be configured manually. The onus is on the developer. It’s often unclear if they’re doing things correctly, until they suddenly lose access or get locked for becoming noncompliant.

The beauty of a CDE is it’s all moved to a central provisioning system. IT can configure the workspace to stay compliant without having to tax the developers directly.

If organizations already have virtual desktops, they may have taken care of some of these functions. But even in virtual desktop environments, the workspace is still tightly coupled to the device. The device just happens to be a virtual machine. In cloud development, the workspace is decoupled from the device. Now developers don’t have to put all their energy into securing devices. This severely mitigates the risk of security breaches happening at device level.

<h2>No need for shortcuts</h2>

Then there are the hassles posed by the shortcuts developers often take to secure systems in conventional coding environments. We recently heard of one of these horror stories taking place at a large company. The company required developers to authenticate into the corporate system to start their coding process, using a key to generate a token that allows them in. Turns out, the developers were taking the key and pasting it to a public website to generate the tokens, which equates to leaving a key out in the public for anyone to use. Every time a security leader saw this happening, the company had to invalidate every key and reissue new ones.
When a company has 25,000 developers, that’s a massive issue. It only takes one of those 25,000 to make a mistake, and an organization has to invalidate all 25,000 and start all over again.

<h2>Compliance benefits</h2>

Another major benefit CDEs provide is in the compliance area. Centralizing control over IT environments allows companies more visibility into the development environment. Enforcing encryption becomes a lot easier when it’s a centralized network-based activity rather than a decentralized device.

In the enterprise version of <a href="https://coder.com/product">Coder’s CDE</a>, organizations can access logs of all developer activity, which can then be audited. You have a very detailed change history of what’s happening in every developer workspace, ultimately helping organizations comply with federal regulations. If a breach or a data loss takes place, organizations have to prove they knew about it – it’s how disclosure laws work. Having that rich auditing capability, if something goes wrong, security leaders can go back in and pinpoint what went wrong.

While the CDE Adoption Report highlights the many productivity, cost, and developer experience benefits CDEs provide, its <a href="https://coder.com/solutions/security">security benefits</a> shouldn’t be underplayed. They meet the needs of security-conscious organizations requiring comprehensive auditing, role-based access control, user provisioning and deprovisioning, and data exfiltration to run zero-trust environments.

Related Content

<ul>
<li><a href="https://coder.com/ebooks-and-reports/reports/cde-adoption-report">The Cloud Development Environment Adoption Report</a></li>
<li><a href="https://coder.com/blog/cdes-offering-improved-developer-productivity-and-experience">CDEs: Offering Improved Developer Productivity and Experience</a></li>
<li><a href="https://coder.com/blog/navigating-the-genai-landscape-with-coder">Navigating the GenAI Landscape with Coder</a></li>
</ul>

In the third accompanying blog to our recent CDE Adoption Report, we delve further into how CDEs help ease organizations’ security concerns.

CDEs Provide Security Benefits to Both Organizations and Developers

A 5% improvement in developer productivity lowers your software engineering costs by 1%.

If you employ 10,000 developers, that’s an $18M savings based on insights from our latest <a href="https://coder.com/ebooks-and-reports/reports/cde-adoption-report">Cloud Development Environment Adoption Report</a>.

Put simply: Making enterprise developers fractionally more productive is a big deal. It’s why developer productivity is a <a href="https://coder.com/ebooks-and-reports/reports/cde-adoption-report">perennial top priority</a> for leaders.

It’s also why <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_artificial_intelligence">generative AI (GenAI)</a> is a hot topic among such leaders. GenAI can make a developer <a href="https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/mckinsey-digital/our-insights/unleashing-developer-productivity-with-generative-ai">20% more productive</a>! 

Coder is a developer productivity company. So it’s only natural that we embrace GenAI in all its glory, right? 

Nope. 

And here’s why.

<h1>GenAI in Software Development Requires Choice</h1>

There is no doubt GenAI is transformational. I don’t use that word lightly or with a hint of hyperbole. I believe it will be as fundamental a technology shift – and as ubiquitous – as smartphones or cloud computing.

But as with any new technology wave, it will be bumpy. Disruptive technologies always are. It would be easy to hold off adopting GenAI in our core product given this volatility. We’ve seen Google’s Gemini get “<a href="https://www.foxbusiness.com/media/former-google-consultant-gemini-what-happens-ai-companies-too-big-too-soon">too big too soon</a>,” Microsoft’s Copilot hallucinated <a href="https://mashable.com/article/microsoft-bing-ai-chatbot-copilot-election-misinformation-study">election results</a>, and ChatGPT falsely labeled <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/chatgpt-texas-college-instructor-backlash-rcna84888">students as cheaters</a>.

But immaturity is not the reason Coder isn’t building GenAI into our products.

The reality is our customers have asked us to not bake GenAI technology directly into the platform. Why? Because Coder is, at its heart, a provisioner. We set up and maintain development environments. Coder’s founders, Kyle and Ammar, ensured Coder was unopinionated in its approach. A core value is getting developers safe access to the right tools so they can stay in flow, writing code. 

The moment we take that decision out of the hands of our customers by picking a GenAI tool, we become opinionated. That’s counter to why customers choose Coder over competing cloud development environments.

GenAI requires choice. Choice of which tools to use. Choice of which individuals get access to those tools. And even choice for individuals to apply different tools to different projects.

The challenge of GenAI is one of governance, not code completion.

<h1>Three Ways Coder Makes GenAI Better</h1>

Coder is a GenAI governance solution. In fact, it drives about 40% of our business today. But it’s far too nuanced to simply say Coder doesn’t make the GenAI tools you buy, we make GenAI tools you buy better (to paraphrase the infamous <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/26/business/media/a-campaign-for-basf.html">BASF</a>).

Let me be more specific. There are three ways Coder makes the GenAI tools you buy better:

<ul>
<li>Lowering the cost of developing your own GenAI tools</li>
<li>Accelerating the rollout and governance of GenAI tools</li>
<li>Incorporating GenAI into tools other than coding assistance</li>
</ul>

<h1>Using Coder For GenAI: Lowering GenAI Development Costs</h1>

One of the first development environments to shift to the cloud was machine learning. Data scientists and developers incorporating AI into their core applications need:

<ul>
<li>Access to large amounts of compute</li>
<li>Ability to leverage GPUs for training LLMs</li>
<li>Proximity to the large data sets underpinning the LLMs</li>
</ul>

This is significantly more complex to do on local laptops. Even the most powerful MacBook Pros struggle to provide the compute, and loading large data sets directly onto developer workstations is cumbersome if not impossible.

Don’t bring AI/ML resources to the developer. Bring the developer to your AI/ML resources.

Coder is the only enterprise CDE optimized for this use case. We provide a template abstraction so you can right-size compute for AI/ML developers. These Templates are powered by Terraform to provision exotic infrastructure elements like GPUs. And we’re self-hosted, so the developer workspace coresides in your cloud next to your data sets.

<a href="https://coder.com/blog/skydio-takes-development-to-the-literal-clouds">Skydio documented their journey with Coder</a>, noting:

&quot;The machine learning team can develop in a workspace with cloud GPU and storage, with no need to configure and connect to these resources each time they’re needed.&quot;

Skydio is not alone. Data science and AI/ML teams are the initial users of Coder in nearly two-thirds of our customers. 

<h1>Using Coder With GenAI: GenAI Provisioning and Governance</h1>

Our fastest growing use case is configuring Coder to provision and govern GenAI. We’re detailing this in our blog series on <a href="https://coder.com/blog/deploy-generative-ai-tools-at-scale-with-coder">deploying GenAI at scale</a> in traditional enterprises, including how we can <a href="https://coder.com/blog/deploy-generative-ai-at-scale-with-one-code-block-using-coder-vs-code-web-and-git">deploy GitHub Copilot</a> with a single code block.

Enabling developers to deploy GenAI tools directly on their laptop is an operational and compliance nightmare. With Coder, they’re centrally provisioned, using automation and role-based access controls. It’s simple to invoke, revoke, and audit the usage. Think GenAI boosts productivity 20%? Prove it with Coder. Worried about GenAI exfiltrating data? Prove – or disprove it – with Coder.

One large investment bank is using Coder to deploy Copilot to 2,500 of its 7,000 developers. If you want access to GenAI, then you need to go to the cloud. It’s a carrot to abandon local development and embrace cloud development. It’s a better developer experience, and ensures the bank has a safe and controlled rollout of an emerging technology.

A large auto manufacturer is experiencing similar benefits, but they’re providing their developers with access to GitHub Copilot, Google Gemini, or Amazon CodeWhisperer depending on their preferred cloud. They empower developers with choice on a project-by-project basis. 

<h1>Using Coder As GenAI: Using GenAI Beyond Code Assistance</h1>

Future products from Coder will include GenAI as part of the core functionality, it just won’t be code assistance tools.

We are building a constellation of tools, each tackling a different source of developer friction. CDEs are great for eliminating the developer tax of onboarding, build times, and compliance. But what about similar points of friction around issues management, requirements management, and other operational tasks that we continue to “shift left” on the developer?

Stay tuned as we continue to innovate. Coder will be a multi-product company within a year. Keep an eye on – or contribute to! – new projects in our <a href="https://github.com/coder">GitHub organization</a>.

<h1>Our Mission: Make Developers 10x More Productive</h1>

GenAI is one aspect of the Coder strategy. Overall, we’re focusing on several ways to improve developer productivity, including:

<ul>
<li> Enhancements to our CDE product. We will radically improve Coder OSS and Enterprise, starting with a new tool to deepen insights. Stay tuned!</li>
<li> The launch of new open source projects based on technologies we pioneered in the CDE space. We have a lot to say about CLIs, testing, and ways to improve Go.</li>
<li> Incorporating GenAI thoughtfully and inline with our mission. Coder’s use of GenAI will enhance developer choice and productivity, not limit it. </li>
</ul>

Today, customers report a 5x gain in time their developers spend writing code. 

We can do better. We can do 10x.

Related Content

<ul>
<li><a href="https://coder.com/blog/deploy-generative-ai-at-scale-with-duet-ai-using-coder">Deploy Generative AI at Scale with Duet AI using Coder</a></li>
<li><a href="https://coder.com/blog/deploy-generative-ai-at-scale-with-one-code-block-using-coder-vs-code-web-and-git">Deploy Generative AI at scale with one code block using Coder, VS Code Web and GitHub Copilot</a></li>
<li><a href="https://coder.com/blog/deploy-generative-ai-tools-at-scale-with-coder">Deploy and Govern Generative AI Tools at Scale with Coder</a></li>
</ul>

Learn what Coder's point of view is on the current GenAI Landscape and how Coder can support you with your GenAI journey. 

Rob's AI blog

Navigating the GenAI Landscape with Coder

It’s no secret developers are some of enterprises’ most valuable, expensive, and hard-to-replace assets. So it stands to reason that organizations should put the highest priority on ensuring that developers are not only working as efficiently and effectively as possible but that they’re happy as well.

Unfortunately, developer satisfaction and productivity is strained. A <a href="https://www.zenhub.com/reports/software-developer-happiness">Zenhub survey</a> showed 10% are dissatisfied, and only 31% were extremely satisfied with their jobs. Plus, developer productivity is lagging for a very good reason: the software industry has moved so many tasks onto developers’ plates that less than a third of their time is spent writing code.

The “shift left” approach—integrating testing and quality control early in the development process—is causing a significant workload increase for developers. According to the CDE Adoption Report, developers now spend nearly as much time on planning, testing, deploying, and maintaining software as they do on actual coding.

There’s a solution. Cloud Development Environments (CDEs) go a long way toward solving these two interrelated issues – the prolonged time to merge and developers’ frustrations with the tasks that impede their productivity.

They shift important development processes like writing code, executing builds, running tests, and deploying applications out of local environments and into the cloud. This streamlines the developer experience, providing organizations’ prized assets with more flexibility and efficiency, helping them to collaborate better and release higher-quality software faster.

A recent Coder survey of 223 developers and business leaders, the focal point of our <a href="https://coder.com/ebooks-and-reports/reports/cde-adoption-report">CDE Adoption Report</a>, shed new light on the role CDEs are playing in making developers happier and more productive. Developers using CDEs reported a 15% higher metric in their overall quality of life compared to developers using conventional coding environments. Coder was one of the top-scoring CDEs (4.4/5) that made developers happier. Respondents also noted that CDEs generated overall productivity improvements in the set-up and ongoing management of development environments.

Let’s unpack these issues.

The biggest frustration developers face is having to suffer through lengthy onboarding – not only when they’re first hired, but whenever environments have to be updated along the way.
In conventional enterprise environments, it can take days or weeks to equip each developer before any lines of code are written. This isn’t the case with CDEs. As Elliot Graebert, Director of Engineering, Infrastructure, Skydio, noted in the CDE Adoption Report: “The time from setting up a new workstation to the first commit to production plummeted from a week to as little as an hour.”

They do this by removing the complexity from the developer onboarding experience. All the development tools, services, and infrastructure developers need can be made accessible through a web browser, or even by connecting through an extension on a local IDE. Often with a configured CDE, all IT departments have to do is give developers a URL and have them sign on. 

Still, onboarding is more than just a one-time task to be carried out at the time of hiring. Large enterprises typically shift developers to new projects four to six times per year, each incurring an “onboarding” tax as they set up the right tools, languages, dependencies, and repositories.

CDEs remove other sources of friction as well.

<ul>
<li>Removing confusing code flows: Not all codebases are created equal. Some are more complex than others, possessing unclear boundaries and many connecting factors. CDEs codify the environment, letting developers use the components that are there rather than having to worry about changes that get made. For example, using <a href="https://coder.com/docs/v2/latest/templates">Coder Templates</a>, developers can create customized cloud development environments, provisioning any platform in the company&#39;s arsenal for their own use.</li>
<li>Code maintenance: In conventional coding environments, developers find themselves wasting time having to update dependencies every time they switch between branches and projects. CDEs remove this hurdle. Since the developer environment is standardized, it automatically works every time. All updates are managed centrally, freeing up the developer to focus on code rather than maintaining the overall system. </li>
<li>Consistent environments: CDEs eliminate occurrences of &quot;but it works on my machine&quot; by ensuring that developers and testers are using the same code, dependencies, and data in a consistent and centralized environment. This is especially important when contractors bring their own devices into the workflow. Their environments can be easily configured and synced within minutes. </li>
<li>Eliminating rework: Manual environment setup can also force developers to re-do tasks if environments don’t sync properly across a development team. A feature change may work on a developer&#39;s machine but break in a CI test or, worse, production. Besides environmental consistency, developers can securely share their work-in-progress applications. Coder gives developers confidence their code will work in CI and production, eliminating rework.</li>
<li>Shortening code reviews: One of the more frustrating parts of the developer experience is having to stop what they’re doing and make themselves available for a code review. It’s bad enough that these tend to happen multiple times a day. If the code has been significantly updated, the reviews can take a while. With cloud dev environments, developers can conduct a code review in a separate tab, test it, and comment on it. This removes the need to conduct lengthy merges because developers are always working with the latest code.</li>
</ul>

Developers are at their best when they can concentrate on crafting quality code without the hassle of managing their development environments. CDEs offer a straightforward solution, removing these obstacles and increasing developer experience and productivity. This approach not only benefits developers by allowing them to focus on their core tasks but also boosts their value to the organization.

Related Content:

<ul>
<li> <a href="https://coder.com/ebooks-and-reports/reports/cde-adoption-report">The Cloud Development Environment Adoption Report</a></li>
<li> <a href="https://coder.com/blog/cde-adoption-report-cloud-development-environments-the-next-frontier-of-programmi">Cloud Development Environments: The Next Frontier of Programming Productivity</a></li>
<li> <a href="https://coder.com/ebooks-and-reports/reports/introducing-cdes-to-your-enterprise">Introducing CDEs to Your Enterprise</a></li>
</ul>

In the second accompanying blog to our recent CDE Adoption Report, we delve further into how CDEs impact developer productivity and job satisfaction.


CDEs: Offering Improved Developer Productivity and Experience

This week we announced the findings of the CDE Adoption Report <a href="https://coder.com/ebooks-and-reports/reports/cde-adoption-report">link</a> sharing insights into the current software development landscape and the critical importance of cloud development environments (CDEs) to the market. But what exactly are CDEs, and why should developers and business leaders care? 

CDEs are a fundamental shift of the developer’s workspace from local machines to the cloud that reimagine most of the developer experience, from the earliest stages of writing code to deploying finalized applications. 

What sets CDEs apart from traditional integrated development environments (IDEs) is that they make use of cloud computing to enable enterprises to cut costs and shorten build times, all while increasing development teams’ productivity and overall experience. 

Don’t just take our word for it: Gartner® established CDEs as a separate category in the 2023 <a href="https://coder.com/ebooks-and-reports/reports/cdes-take-root-in-gartner-hype-cycle-report">Hype Cycle™ for Emerging Technologies</a>, including them among a list of promising technologies that will reach mainstream adoption within five to ten years. 

Gartner predicts that 60% of cloud workloads will be built and deployed using CDEs by 2026. We believe this indicates an upward trend of awareness and adoption across the developer community and broader technology landscape. 

As for our survey, it found that the industry is actually progressing at a much faster pace, with 66% of large organizations already using CDEs in development.

<h2>But why is this acceleration happening?</h2>

Let’s dive into our survey - we polled 223 developers and business leaders globally from November 10 to 23, 2023. We focused on enterprises employing at least 2,000 workers and 250 developers and summarized their responses into the key data points and themes of the CDE Adoption Report. 

<h2>CDE awareness is widespread: 95% of participants are familiar with CDEs</h2>

Our survey supports this trend, with 95% of respondents reporting they are familiar with CDE technology. The emergence of CDEs represents a major milestone in the trajectory of software development, bringing with them an era of centralized, efficient and cloud-centric workflows that benefit a wide variety of organizations, software development builds and developers. 

<h2>CDEs are adding value at the enterprise level: 66% of large organizations are currently using CDEs</h2>

Some of the core benefits of CDEs include time and cost savings, increased developer productivity and experience, enhanced security and collaboration, expanded access to developer tools, scalability, and streamlined workflows. Beyond offering a platform for coding, these environments epitomize the convergence of various technologies that truly bring the whole developer experience into the cloud and the next echelon of software development. 

Now imagine applying these benefits at scale. Assuming average developer densities of 35.4%, average software developer salaries of $144,000, and savings of 40 hours on time to first commit for each developer (a number provided by Coder customer testimonials), organizations with 2,000 employees can save nearly $2 million in onboarding costs. Savings for organizations with 10,000 employees skyrocket even further – up to nearly $10 million.

Our survey revealed that 66% of large organizations are currently using CDEs, highlighting their rapid growth despite being an emerging technology. Why are CDEs experiencing such growth? Happier, more productive developers, and the benefits mentioned above, of course. 

<h2>What’s to come</h2>

Not only has the introduction of CDEs to the market generated a plethora of benefits, it’s also directly solved a number of developers’ and businesses’ key pain points, including simplifying and optimizing the onboarding process, keeping companies’ code secure, improving the developer experience and cutting costs. 

The CDE Adoption Report deep-dives into each of these benefits, challenges and more, supported by the testimonials of Coder clients and CDE users including Skydio, Palantir, and others to share how CDEs have tackled these issues for their organizations. 

It’s not a question of if all developers will benefit from a CDE, but when. This technology is transforming the developer role and its function within organizations for the better, and we’re excited for you to follow along with our report and blog series to learn more about how your organization can benefit.

Download the CDE Adoption Report <a href="https://coder.com/ebooks-and-reports/reports/cde-adoption-report">here</a>.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Gartner, Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies, 2023, Arun Chandrasekaran, Melissa Davis, 2 August 2023

GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally, and HYPE CYCLE is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved.

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

Related Content:

<ul>
<li> <a href="https://coder.com/blog/introducing-cloud-development-environments-to-your-enterprise">Introducing Cloud Development Environments to Your Enterprise</a></li>
<li> <a href="https://coder.com/blog/cdes-are-going-to-live-up-to-the-hype">CDEs Are Going to Live Up to the Hype</a></li>
<li> <a href="https://coder.com/blog/exploring-code-server-and-coder-unleashing-the-power-of-web-based-development-en">Exploring code-server and Coder: Unleashing the Power of Web-Based Development Environments</a></li>
</ul>

Shift your development from local to the cloud with CDEs, enhancing every step from coding to deployment. Get access to insights in our CDE Adoption Report.

The CDE Adoption report

Cloud Development Environments: The Next Frontier of Programming Productivity 

Ask any developer, and they’ll say that day is already here. Most people who write code for a living have used – or at least are very familiar with – Cloud Development Environments, which provide cloud-based workspaces to build, test and deploy applications. CDEs have moved out of the software labs and are getting adopted at some of the largest Fortune 500 companies. In December 2022, Redmonk declared 2023 to be “<a href="https://redmonk.com/jgovernor/2022/12/01/the-year-of-the-cloud-development-environment/">The Year of the Cloud Development Environment</a>.” And Gartner® weighed in this past August by including CDEs in its annual <a href="https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2023-08-16-gartner-places-generative-ai-on-the-peak-of-inflated-expectations-on-the-2023-hype-cycle-for-emerging-technologies">Hype Cycle™ for Emerging Technologies, 2023</a>.

What does this mean?

CDEs are clearly a technology worth watching – and worth talking about. In its Hype Cycle report, Gartner predicted that “by 2026, 60% of cloud workloads will be built and deployed using CDEs.” That is a significant jump in mindshare based on the report’s estimate that CDEs had reached just 5% to 20% of their target audience. The Hype Cycle report grouped CDEs in a list of technologies that are five to 10 years away from mainstream adoption.

At Coder, we, of course, take great interest in outside assessments of CDEs’ prospects. Gartner identified Coder as a “Sample Vendor” in the CDE space, so we’re paying close attention to the ebbs and flows of market perceptions.
We’re not surprised that CDEs are seen as a long-term opportunity to drive business value. Coder has been creating Cloud Development Environments for six years now, and the developers we engage with not only place a high value on frictionless experiences – they insist that CDEs give them the tools to do their best work.

A number of factors are driving CDEs’ rapid adoption – and they all have one thing in common: they’re not going away any time soon.

<h2>Collaboration and remote work</h2>

The move to remote work has complicated the onboarding process for employees across organizations. This is particularly true for developers, who need access to a wide array of very specific tools to do their jobs. In conventional enterprise environments, it can take days or weeks to equip each developer before any lines of code are written.

CDEs remove the technical complexity from the onboarding experience. All the development tools, services, and infrastructure developers need is accessible through a web browser. This cuts the onboarding time down to hours, or even minutes. Developers don’t have to set up, manage, or maintain local environments. Coder streamlines traditional development collaboration by ensuring everyone is using a consistent and robust environment.

<h2>Customization</h2>

The days where development teams could specialize on one architecture are over. Today, organizations are tasked with building a wide array of applications that require custom-configured hardware to support different architectures. This can be expensive. Unless an organization is willing to spend thousands per developer on specialized hardware such as GPUs or alternate CPU architectures, the code they’re writing on their workstations may not run in the cloud.

CDEs remove this requirement. By abstracting the hardware requirements, developers can work on any architecture their cloud provider offers. Using a CDE, organizations can provision development instances that are identical to production,write their code, and decommission it once the builds are complete. Since all of the tooling is provided in the CDE developers can use one workspace per project, eliminating the need to constantly reconfigure tooling – or worse maintaining multiple workstations – when on multiple projects.

<h2>Security threats</h2>

It’s no surprise that software supply chain attacks are escalating. A <a href="https://world.einnews.com/pr_news/659375862/software-supply-chain-attacks-to-cost-the-world-60-billion-by-2025">recent report</a> by Cybersecurity Ventures projected the global annual cost of these attacks will grow 15% a year, from $46 billion in 2023 to $138 billion in 2031.

CDEs won’t eliminate cyber threats, but they can give organizations better oversight over their environments. With CDEs, IT can control the tooling versions that developers use, and keep an audit trail of when and where it was used. Plus, developers contracting with firms can’t leave with company secrets because CDEs can eliminate developers’ ability to download actual source code. Developers have access to the IDE, which is working on storage and systems that IT controls.

<h2>Automation</h2>

Streamlining DevOps workflows injects a layer of complexity into an organization’s processes. Adding more plug-ins and extensions makes it harder to distribute regular updates and configurations to individual machines. CDEs remove the requirement to update each machine. When a new workspace version is promoted to the CDE, developers simply update their workspace for that project rather than updating their workstation. They integrate well with DevOps workflows and tools, helping to streamline development, testing and deployment.

<h2>Using Coder</h2>

Coder is perfectly positioned for organizations looking to realize the benefits of frictionless development environments. The platform is self-hosted, which allows organizations to control what, where and when developers are using. Developers can develop on specified clouds using the organization’s specific hardware in a space that matches their production environment. They can build and test faster, they never have to wait for an upgrade, and they can replace onboarding time with coding time.

CDEs are a hot topic everywhere from community-driven open source projects all the way up to the largest Fortune 500 companies. We think they’ll be a topic of conversation for a long time.

Gartner Hype Cycle reports identify technologies at an early or embryonic stage that promise potentially transformative benefits to early adopters while still carrying some deployment risks. 

Gartner hype cycle header

CDEs Are Going to Live Up to the Hype

Legendary management consultant Peter Drucker once famously said, “You can&#39;t manage what you can&#39;t measure.” This holds true for software development too. At Coder, we know how important developer experience (DX) is to the success of developers, their teams, and their organizations. 

Before you measure what matters, you need to understand what matters to developers. Developer experience is about how developers interact with their tools and environment. Of course, developers want to deliver quality code, on time. Improving DX removes the obstacles that let them do this.

You don’t have to be a developer productivity expert to improve DX. If your organization is lucky enough to have a developer productivity expert, or you are one yourself, then you already know these things. But do you know about Coder? Elevating DX is probably the biggest reason we started Coder and other <a href="https://github.com/coder">open source projects</a>.

So let’s look at some opportunities to improve DX and some key metrics that give you insight about them. Along the way, you’ll see how Coder makes elevating and measuring DX an iterative, productive process.

<h1>Metric 1: Onboarding time</h1>

New developers don’t deliver when they’re onboarding. A lot of teams just accept this as a cost of doing business. That’s an entirely reasonable thing to believe. After all, it takes weeks, or longer, before a new developer is fully productive. And there’s the extra cost to the rest of the team as they support the new developer instead of coding. 

You’ll see the effects of onboarding with these metrics:

<ul>
<li>Time to first commit to production: From their first day, how long does it take a new developer to commit code that goes to production?</li>
<li>Velocities of other teammates: You might also notice that a team’s velocity slows down when it takes on a new teammate. </li>
</ul>

Onboarding might seem like one of the easiest metrics to reduce. It is, as you’ll see in a moment. But efforts to reduce it can go to an extreme. Of course, it takes time to train a new developer on your organization’s technology and processes. And it’s important for a team to take the time to share team culture with the new developer.

But the time spent to repeat the tedious, often undocumented tasks to get a new developer up to speed is time wasted. This is one of Coder’s superhero powers: reproducing development environments at the literal click of a button. A new developer doesn’t have to chase down the IT team for software licensing or special hardware. There’s no need to break the flow of other developers to help sort out dependencies and versions. Coder lets a team set up, document, and track these complexities as a single source of truth then reproduce it effortlessly and instantly, for each team member. Improvements to a template are instantly available to its workspace users. We’ve heard of amazing success stories from our users, even <a href="https://coder.com/blog/skydio-takes-development-to-the-literal-clouds">reducing the time to first commit to the first day!</a>

<h1>Metric 2: Inner loop optimization</h1>

The “inner loop” is the work that developers do in their development environment. Developers refactor and build several times a day, but their IDE often leaves them waiting while it generates indexes or loads sub-projects. 

We consider this the missing metric. Despite developers <a href="https://xkcd.com/303/">playing with swords</a>, not many teams actually invest in it, let alone measure it.

Metrics for inner loops depend on your team’s workflow. Here are a couple of obvious metrics:

<ul>
<li>Time to first file open: How long does a developer wait after opening their IDE before they can start editing a file?</li>
<li>Build time: How long does it take to build a project?</li>
</ul>

These inner loop metrics are purely quantitative, and they’re often easy to measure. For example, measuring build time for a Java project might be as simple as running time gradle build on the command line. 

Once you’ve identified the slow parts of the inner loop, you can look into speeding them up. Most development tools support incremental builds or caching indexes. Coder is especially useful for leveraging these features. For example, IntelliJ has <a href="https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/shared-indexes.html">shared indexes</a> which Coder can configure and generate. For an extra boost, a team can use Coder to cache common assets with faster networking and storage in the cloud instead of waiting for a laptop’s wi-fi connection.

<h1>Metric 3: Bug resolution time</h1>

Defects cost a lot, of course. They cost testing time to find, reproduce, and report. They steal time from new feature development. And they cost sales. So the cost to prevent defects gives a good return on investment. 

There are countless websites, services, and consultants, happy to help you with metrics for testing. We’ll only touch on some simple, but useful, metrics for bug resolution time:

<ul>
<li>Time between defect detection and resolution: This is a simplistic metric, to be sure. Still, a team with a decelerating bug resolution time is a sign of trouble. </li>
<li>Bug severity distribution, bug assignments, bug reporting frequency: These metrics give clues about the quality of your code. A disproportionate number of high-priority bugs is a signal of poor code quality. Or it might be a sign of the quality of the bug reports themselves. Are bugs clearly reported and reproducible? Do they contain sufficient information for a developer to work from?</li>
<li>Defect resolution efficiency (DRE): To pinpoint which part of your process is causing more defects, consider DRE. It’s a more sophisticated set of metrics than just time between detection and resolution. DRE measures the percentage of defect resolutions between different phases of development. DRE is a good prevention tool: the sooner you find and resolve a defect, the less it costs your organization. </li>
</ul>

Coder isn’t a defect management tool. But it certainly improves the chances of finding and fixing them. Another one of Coder’s super powers is never again hearing the words <a href="https://coder.com/blog/it-works-on-my-machine-explained">“but it works on my machine”</a>. Coder prevents this situation because developers, testers, and deployers all work from identical, consistent environments that use the same code, dependencies, and data. Define it once as a <a href="https://coder.com/docs/v2/latest/templates">template</a>, use it many times in <a href="https://coder.com/docs/v2/latest/workspaces">workspaces</a> that behave identically.

<h1>Metric 4: Code reviews</h1>

A proven way to improve development outcomes, with some beneficial side effects, is timely, consistent peer code reviews. Code reviews are a vital tool for managing technical debt, preventing defects, improving maintainability, and encouraging a culture of collaboration, professional development, innovation, and problem solving.

The subject of code reviews is a broad one, so we’ll cover some metrics that let you pick some juicy, lower hanging fruit:

<ul>
<li>Response time for code reviews: How long does it take before a teammate responds to a PR? Does your team’s workflow allow a developer to work on other issues while waiting for a PR? How do team leads, managers, or product owners manage assignments for code reviews?</li>
<li>Number of comments per review, ratio of accepted and rejected code changes: These metrics give clues to the quality of the reviews. </li>
</ul>

Code reviews are more productive when the participants get on the same page then interact directly. Does your team have a code review style guide? When is it appropriate to just type LGTM (Looks good to me)? When does code deserve more in-depth comments?

Repo platforms like GitHub and GitLab have excellent code commenting capabilities. You can complement these features with modules in Coder workspaces to connect developers to repos and their teammates. For example, <a href="https://coder.com/blog/introducing-the-coder-registry">add modules</a> for cloning repos in GitHub, submit PRs, and starting IDEs. When reviewing, developers are confident they are looking at the same code with the same tools.

<h1>Metric 5: Deployment frequency</h1>

Increasing deployment frequency is often a big challenge for development teams. I’m sure you’ve heard about horror stories, and even survived a few yourself. But the reasons for more deployments are clear, including faster time to market, happier customers, and risk mitigation for big projects.

There are many causes and effects in and outside your team that affect deployment frequency. Once you’ve decided on a frequency, here are some simple metrics that help you stay on track:

<ul>
<li>Deployment frequency: This is an obvious one, but it still helps to understand the nature of your deployments. What is the historical average time to deploy? For example, can your team promise monthly deployments if it averages 12 deployments in a year? Or can it deploy on the 1st of every month for a year?</li>
<li>Success/failure rate of deployments: How often are deployments rolled back or re-deployed because of an incident? This is another obvious one, but it gives a clue to how well your teams are collaborating and detects early signs of weaknesses.</li>
</ul>

Internally, deploying more frequently means smoother-running, more collaborative development, testing, and deployment teams. We won’t go into the established methods for increasing deployment frequency, like implementing CI/CD, building cross-functional teams, and so on. Instead, think of Coder as the foundation that you build these things onto. Coder reduces the friction of setting up development environments. It makes it easier and faster for testers, deployers, and other contributors to make changes without waiting on tickets.

<h1>Elevate, measure, refine, repeat</h1>

There’s a range of metrics for elevating developer experience. Just measuring onboarding time confirms the cost of taking in a new developer. More sophisticated metrics, like DRE, reveal opportunities to improve the entire devops workflow. We made Coder to take advantage of these insights. Coder and its other <a href="https://github.com/coder">open source projects</a> turn DX into an iterative activity. You improve your team’s DX with confident decisions. And you get that confidence from consistent, accurate metrics.

<h1>Start elevating your team’s developer experience</h1>

<a href="https://coder.com/pricing">Get started with Coder</a> to elevate and measure DX. Coder is easy to install with just a script. <a href="https://coder.com/trial">Sign up for a 30-day trial</a> of Coder Enterprise for enhanced collaboration, security, governance, and management features.

Learn about the opportunities to improve Developer Experience (DX) and some key metrics that give you insight about them. Along the way, you’ll see how Coder makes elevating and measuring DX an iterative, productive process.


Elevating developer experience with Coder

Elevating Developer Experience: Use Coder to Measure and Optimize Developer Productivity

Keep developers in flow.

It’s not just a mantra here at Coder.

It’s the mission that guides the company. And it’s the reason 
we’re releasing a new version of our software. Let me explain.

<h1>Coder Provides the Most Advanced Self-Hosted Cloud Development Environment</h1>

Coder provides cloud development environments (CDE). What does that mean? According to Gartner: “CDEs provide remote, ready-to-use access to a cloud-hosted development environment with minimal effort for setup and configuration. This decoupling of the development workspace from the physical workstation enables a low-friction, consistent developer experience. CDEs comprise elements of a traditional Integrated Developer Environment (IDE), such as code editing, debugging, code review and code collaboration. They increasingly include ML-based coding assistants and integrate with DevOps platforms&quot;. Gartner predicts that, “by 2026, 60% of cloud workloads will be built and deployed using CDEs&quot;.

We know that CDEs are not only a critical component, but they’re the future of development. 

But there’s a catch.

Most CDEs are SaaS — and that’s a problem.

Why?

Because CDE are still an early adopt technology. That means most organizations adopting CDEs are sophisticated software development shops. For these organizations, software is critical to their digital transformation. And that means their software developers are core to their business strategy. These early adopters tend to fall in one of two profiles:

<ul>
<li>Digital-native organizations. Born in the cloud? If so, you’re a digital-native organization. You probably offer a SaaS or digital experience, like Netflix or Uber. Software is core to your business strategy, and developers are the kings and queens of your value generation. You invest heavily in acquiring the best developer talent. Better developers leads to competitive advantage. But let’s be honest. You need all the nerd knobs. You’re already developing in the cloud, but with an expensive homegrown cloud development solution that requires five or more full-time employees to mange it. You can’t rely on an overly opinionated SaaS offering that dictates your IDEs, infrastructure, or CI/CD integrations. You need flexibility. You need a deployable CDE solution that gets your developers onboarded and coding on day one.</li>
<li>Digital-forward organizations. You’ve stood the test of time and offer the best manufacturing, financial services, retail, or utilities offering in your market. You aspire to be digital-native, but you’re encumbered with a legacy architecture. And regulations. Oh, the regulations. Your developers lead the charge in your digital transformation, but you can’t expose the company to undue risk. SaaS won’t cut it. You need a CDE that you can deploy and configure in your private, public, or multicloud environment. SaaS solutions don’t meet regulatory requirements and certainly can’t work in air-gapped environments. In fact, chances are you’re repatriating apps as you read this. You need a solution that provides SaaS-like ease of use, but the governance and portability of software.</li>
</ul>

Coder offers a self-hosted cloud development environment (CDE). We’re deployed at some of the largest, most advanced companies in the world. Digital native? Coder customers serve a combined 1.6 billion SaaS users. Digital-forward? In financial services alone, Coder customers control $22.8 trillion in assets under management, roughly the same as the United States&#39; GDP.

<h1>Introducing Coder 2.0</h1>

Coder has developed a CDE solution that balances the flexibility of deployable software with the ease-of-use of SaaS. We’ve worked hard to meet early adopters where they are: With a solution that enables developers to shift from local workstations to cloud-based workspaces. The capabilities we’re announcing today further this goal.

Specifically, we’re announcing <a href="https://coder.com/webinars/coder-2">Coder 2.0</a> — the second major release of our cloud development environment. The new capabilities in Coder 2.0 are available in our open source software. In our most significant release, we:

<ul>
<li>Empower developers with Envbuilder to self-serve with Dev Containers. At the core of Coder is the idea that developers need autonomy and control over their environment — but without exposing the company to risk. Enter <a href="https://containers.dev/">Developer Container</a>, an emerging spec pioneered by Microsoft. Dev Containers enable developers to configure and save their entire development environment as metadata in a <a href="https://containers.dev/implementors/json_reference/">devcontainer.json</a> file. Now developer workspaces can be expressed entirely as code, making it easier to spin up, replicate, and port developer workspaces. Coder has always provided a developer workspace abstraction. In Coder 2.0, we implement support for Dev Container as the underlying spec defining this workspace. Coder Environment Builder — or Envbuilder for short — is a new capability that makes it effortless for developers to implement Dev Containers, all without straying from the golden infrastructure path established by their Platform Engineering teams.</li>
</ul>

<ul>
<li>Enable Platform Engineering teams to operate anywhere easily with a Template Registry. Workspaces are Coder’s abstraction for developers. Templates are the abstraction for Platform Engineering teams. Templates are Coder’s abstracted configuration capability that leverage the <a href="https://www.hashicorp.com/products/terraform">Terraform</a> binary under the hood to support CDE provisioning across any infrastructure or cloud (and, no, we’re not affected by HashiCorp’s move to the <a href="https://www.hashicorp.com/license-faq">BSL license</a>). Available in Coder 2.0 (Sept. 27) is our Template Registry, a way to discover, browse, and contribute coder Templates. We’re launching the registry with 250 Coder Templates and modules, with more than 100 coming from our community. Maybe you built the best way to configure Coder for Jupyter Notebooks on Google Cloud using JFrog Artifactory and GitHub. Great! Share the template in our registry. We make it easy to get started with Coder. Expect the Template Registry to be the de facto way the Coder community shared Coder Open Source knowledge.</li>
</ul>

Introducing the Coder Registry #coding #remotedevelopment

<ul>
<li>Ensures a frictionless experience with single-click integration with JFrog. Templates greatly simplify the deployment of Coder as self-hosted software. But we didn’t stop there. We see a future where deployable, self-hosted software is as easy to implement as SaaS. We first demonstrated this with our <a href="https://coder.com/blog/self-hosted-remote-development-in-jetbrains-ides-now-available-to-coder-users">JetBrains integration</a>. Today, with Coder 2.0, we’re announcing an integration with JFrog. More than 60% of Coder customers are JFrog customers. Sure, you could configure JFrog Artifactory to work with Coder using Templates — but we wanted to make it one-click simple. With today’s release, you can automatically connect JFrog Artifactory as the backend system to store Coder elements. Moreover, Coder then exposes JFrog Xray metadata directly in the Coder UI to shift vulnerability assessment data left directly to the developer. Now developers can see if their workspaces are using known safe or known vulnerable assets — all without leaving their workflow.</li>
</ul>

Single-Click Integration with JFrog #coding #remotedevelopment

<h1>Get Started With Coder 2.0 Open Source</h1>

Coder 2.0 is available on September 27, 2023. Several of the capabilities are already available in our open source software today. To get started, you can:

<ul>
<li>Download our open source from GitHub. You can experience Dev Containers and JFrog integrations today by downloading Coder 2.0 from our <a href="https://github.com/coder/coder">GitHub repository</a>. The Template Registry will debut on September 27, 2023 on a special webinar designed to go deep on Coder 2.0 capabilities. <a href="https://coder.com/webinars/coder-2/register?back_button=false">Register now</a> to get your front row seat.</li>
<li>Swing by the booth at JFrog swampUp 2023 in San Jose, CA. JFrog CTO and cofounder, Yoav Landman, will demonstrate the JFrog and Coder integration live as part of his keynote at JFrog’s user event, <a href="https://swampup.jfrog.com/">swampUP</a>, at 9:00 AM PT today. If you’re attending, stop by! We’ll have a booth in the sponsor pavilion with full demonstrations of all Coder 2.0 capabilities.</li>
<li>Request a trial of Coder Enterprise 2.0. Want to experience how Coder 2.0 can solve your developer productivity challenges at scale? <a href="https://coder.com/trial">Request a trial</a> of Coder Enterprise 2.0. Based on Coder Open Source, Coder Enterprise adds governance, security, and observability capabilities that Platform Engineering and DevOps teams need to scale CDEs in production.</li>
</ul>

<h1>We’re Just Getting Started On Solving Developer Productivity Challenges</h1>

Today marks a significant milestone in Coder’s journey. Coder 2.0 is a self-hosted software solution that leads the market for cloud development environment solutions. But we’re just getting started.

Moving forward, you can expect Coder to focus on systematically removing obstacles that thwart developer productivity. Developer onboarding taking too long? Build times too slow? AI code assistance too difficult? We’ve got you back. After all, developers are some of the most critical — and expensive — assets in the digital era. That’s way we’re laser focused on providing a fantastic developer experience by keeping your developers productive.

Coder has arrived. We’re a new player in the developer experience market.

Trust Coder to keep your developers in flow.

Keep developers in flow.

It’s not just a mantra here at Coder.

It’s the mission that guides the company. And it’s the reason 
we’re releasing a new version of our software. Let me explain.

Announcing Coder 2.0: Keep Developers In Flow

Rob Whiteley serves as CEO of Coder. Previously he was GM of NGINX. He has led marketing, product, and analyst teams for companies like Hedvig, Riverbed, and Fo

AI-native Development

Secure Environments for 2,500+ Developers

Rob Whiteley

Explore the latest from Rob

Coder’s Customers Led Our Series C: What That Tells Me About AI

Is the IDE Dead? The Rise of Agentic AI in Software Development

Coder is Open To Build: The Infrastructure for Autonomous Coding

The AI-Native Developer Stack: Rethinking Code From Ideation To Production In Minutes

Why CDEs Should Be on IT Leaders' Agendas: Insights from the New Gartner Market Guide

What happened in Vegas

Coder Raises $35M to Accelerate the Cloud Development Environment Market with Extended Open Source, Enhanced CDE Capabilities, and Expanded Global Reach

Why CDEs are One of the trends included in Gartner® report, Top 5 Strategic Technology Trends in Software Engineering for 2024

Related content

Using Claude Code with Coder Workspaces

Introducing Coder Agents

Self-Hosted Doesn’t Always Mean What It Implies