Coder Secures and Accelerates Mission-Critical Innovation in the Public Sector
Summary: Why Government Agencies Choose Coder
- Fully self-hosted, keeping data and environments within controlled infrastructure. Open-source for easy vulnerability scanning and transparency.
- Runs in air-gapped environments or any major cloud, with secure access on government-furnished equipment without device modifications.
- Supports all IDEs, developer tools, and programming languages, allowing teams to standardize environments while using familiar tooling.
- Included in the Iron Bank and Big Bang repositories, ensuring alignment with U.S. federal security standards.
- Simplifies accreditation processes in the U.S. and European regions, meeting stringent compliance requirements.
Development teams in government and defense agencies face distinct challenges, including safeguarding classified source code and data, managing contractor onboarding and offboarding efficiently, and securely working within air-gapped environments.
Public sector organizations often prioritize reliability and security when adopting new technologies. However, many developers in these agencies still rely on local development environments, which increases the risks of data exfiltration and environment inconsistencies.
This tension between maintaining security and optimizing developer productivity is not new; however, it highlights the need for purpose-built tech that addresses these challenges.
Palantir’s Experience with Coder
While all of our public sector customers prefer to keep their use of Coder confidential, Palantir offers a representative example of how organizations in adjacent industries benefit from Coder.
Operating in highly regulated spaces, Palantir faced challenges similar to those faced by government agencies, including the need for secure, efficient, and standardized development environments.
Challenges
As Palantir’s development teams grew, they faced increasing demands for faster build and test cycles, consistent development environments, and efficient onboarding for new developers. To address these needs, they considered several approaches:
- Providing more powerful laptops addressed compute limitations but was neither scalable nor cost-effective. Nor did it address the inconsistencies with developers maintaining their own local environments.
- Self-service cloud VMs allowed developers to provision their own environments but introduced significant configuration overhead, which often resulted in cases of “it works on my machine.”
- Pre-configured VMs reduced setup time for developers but placed a heavy maintenance burden on infrastructure teams to ensure environments were patched and up to date. They were also costly, as over-provisioning at a 1-to-1 VM-to-developer ratio meant VMs often ran around the clock, even when developers weren’t actively working.
None of these options fully addressed Palantir’s need for secure, scalable, and developer-friendly environments. They adopted Coder on Amazon’s Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) to meet the broad needs of their development teams.
Solutions
We think Palantir tells the story best, so check out their blog post for a detailed account of their experience with Coder. But to summarize, here’s what Palantir found most valuable about adopting Coder:
- Coder works on top of Kubernetes for the compute layer. By combining it with Amazon EKS, Palantir minimized operational overhead for their infrastructure team, enabling them to focus on higher-value tasks.
- Developers retained the ability to use custom dotfiles and startup scripts, preserving years of personalized workflows. This blend of standardization and customization allowed environments to feel both consistent and familiar.
- With self-service access, developers could deploy new environments, request additional resources, and get to work faster—all with just a few clicks.
- Coder integrated seamlessly with GitHub Enterprise, making it easy for users to clone repositories and manage SSH configurations. Combined with self-service features, this eliminated much of the transactional support previously required from Palantir’s infrastructure team.
These improvements translated into measurable gains, including a 78% reduction in front-end build times, 71% faster git clone speeds, and significantly reduced onboarding and support overhead. Developers were empowered to focus on building and collaborating, while infrastructure teams dedicated more time to optimizing tools instead of troubleshooting issues.
Purpose-Built for Secure and Standardized Development
Coder centralizes development environments on fully air-gapped infrastructure, providing the control and security required for classified work while eliminating burdensome toil that crushes developer productivity.
Government agencies choose Coder because it addresses three mission-critical needs: centralized management of development environments, alignment with existing security protocols in their on-prem infrastructure, and solutions that reduce developer toil to boost productivity:
Absolute Security and Compliance
Coder meets the stringent security requirements of government and defense agencies. Its self-hosted and open-source architecture ensures that all data, source code, and development environments remain within an organization’s controlled infrastructure and never need to be stored on a developer’s local laptop. This eliminates a critical risk vector while simplifying the accreditation process for standards like the US Authority to Operate and UK NCSC guidelines.
With air-gapped deployments, end-to-end encryption, and role-based access control, Coder provides the control and protection required for managing sensitive code and data. Additionally, Coder is available in the Iron Bank and Big Bang repositories, ensuring easy access and alignment with federal security standards.
Standardization Through Infrastructure as Code
Coder enables agencies to standardize and manage development environments using Terraform templates, ensuring every environment is consistent, reproducible, and secure by default. For agencies with multi-organization deployments, Coder allows each organization to operate completely independently with unique users, workspace templates, and underlying infrastructure. This ensures isolated operations, providing the flexibility to accommodate contractors, separate teams, or different classified projects while maintaining strict security boundaries and operational autonomy.
Operational Efficiency in Secure Environments
With automated workspace provisioning, developers can be onboarded to new environments in minutes instead of the days or weeks required before Coder. They can use their government-furnished equipment without modification, keeping a restricted Windows OS while coding in secure Coder workspaces on any version of Linux or other operating systems, such as legacy Windows.
Moving from a stock Windows GFE laptop to Linux with the necessary libraries and permissions at one government organization took four months of approvals and queues. Coder eliminates this delay with pre-configured workspaces, enabling faster productivity. This also means developers can rely on thin clients instead of high-powered machines, as all compute happens securely within the organization’s private infrastructure.
Non-Negotiable Security, Uncompromising Productivity
Security and governance aren’t optional for public sector teams—they’re non-negotiable. Coder delivers on that promise by keeping source code and data secure within controlled infrastructure while simplifying development workflows.
Developers spend less time troubleshooting and more time coding, and infrastructure teams can focus on improving tools instead of firefighting approval queues and support requests. With Coder, organizations handling sensitive data can work smarter without compromising on what matters most.
Do you want to hear more about how other regulated companies secure their development environments with Coder? Contact us for a demo today.
Subscribe to our Newsletter
Want to stay up to date on all things Coder? Subscribe to our monthly newsletter and be the first to know when we release new things!
