How Coder Enables Innovation at Leading Tech Companies
Summary: Why Technology Companies Choose Coder
- Developers can spin up reliable, ready-to-code environments in minutes, ensuring consistency and reducing lost time during project onboarding.
- Coder’s open-source platform gives companies the flexibility to inspect, extend, and integrate it with other internal developer platforms like Backstage.
- Automated resource management optimizes cloud spend without sacrificing performance.
- Sensitive data and source code remain secure with Coder’s self-hosted model, meeting even the strictest security requirements.
- Access to cloud-based GPUs and scalable resources makes Coder a perfect fit for machine learning and generative AI workloads.
Innovation is more than a buzzword for tech companies where a faster release, quicker iteration, or a frictionless developer workflow can be the difference between setting the pace and scrambling to keep up.
Whether our customers lead the charge in autonomous driving systems or redefine entertainment streaming, they all recognize that innovation doesn’t happen out of thin air. It starts with developers. They understand that giving their teams the right tools and environments isn’t just a perk; it’s how they stay competitive.
Like the platform engineering teams in our customers’ organizations, everything we do is rooted in solving problems for developers because we know that if we’re not making their lives better, the rest doesn’t matter.
Coder’s cloud development environments aren’t just about securing development environments—although that’s a big deal, too—they’re about removing the friction that slows teams down. We believe consistency, speed, and adaptability make a difference when developers are heads-down on the next big thing.
Real-World Success: Standardizing Environments at Scale
Dropbox Simplifies Environment Provisioning with Coder
Challenge
Provisioning developer environments with legacy in-house tooling was slow and error-prone. Before adopting Coder, Dropbox used a monolithic, Python-based solution to provision VM-based development environments for more than 1,000 engineers. While functional, this approach introduced significant challenges:
- The in-house solution was complex and difficult to maintain. Adding new features or configurations required non-trivial effort and detailed documentation, slowing down the pace of innovation.
- Developers relied on command-line tools and lengthy documentation to create and manage environments, resulting in a frustrating and inefficient developer experience.
- The legacy system lacked optimization for cloud usage, leading to the over-provisioning of VMs and higher operational costs.
Solution
In just four months, Dropbox’s engineering team migrated 1,000 developers to Coder cloud development environments. These new environments delivered faster provisioning, improved usability, and reduced costs:
- Coder’s Terraform-based templates on AWS EC2 allowed for quick and consistent environment provisioning. Startup times improved by 75%, enabling developers to get to work faster.
- Coder delivered a development experience that felt as natural as working locally, with full support for developers’ preferred tools, IDEs, and custom dotfiles. This reduced friction, boosted adoption, and freed engineers to focus on building rather than managing environments.
- Features like autostart/stop functionality, scheduling, and bin packing multiple workspaces per VM helped Dropbox cut cloud computing and storage costs by 30%, without sacrificing performance.
Skydio Powers AI and ML Workloads with Coder
Challenge
Skydio, known for its autonomous drones, designs and builds everything in-house—from the hardware and onboard software to the SaaS platform that manages it all. Their development efforts spanned everything from AI/ML training with GPUs to deploying updates for autonomous drones in the field.
But slow, manual processes made onboarding and managing environments a constant pain for developers and IT alike:
- Developers spent up to a week setting up workstations with tools, codebases, and dependencies, requiring frequent IT assistance.
- A homegrown virtual desktop system lacked automation, leaving VMs and GPUs running 24/7, unnecessarily driving up cloud costs.
- Maintaining and customizing environments for specialized tasks, like AI/ML workflows or GPU-based training, was time-consuming and pulled focus from core development work.
Solution
Skydio replaced their homegrown virtual desktop system with Coder, fundamentally changing how they provisioned and managed developer environments. In just a few months, they transitioned fully to Coder, and the results were immediately self-evident:
- Automated shutdowns for idle VMs and GPUs reduced cloud computing expenses by 90%, eliminating the inefficiencies of their previous system.
- New developers could configure workstations and make their first production commits in under an hour, compared to a week previously.
- Using Terraform, Skydio built templates for specific workflows, including GPU-enabled environments for AI/ML training and GUI-based workflows like 3D rendering.
- Skydio could roll out new datasets or tool upgrades to all developer environments instantly, keeping teams aligned without disruption.
- Standardized environments meant developers could quickly resolve build issues using shared templates and internal help forums.
Features and Benefits for Innovators in Tech
Tech companies often find themselves at a critical juncture: build versus buy. Many of these companies, despite their engineering prowess, have attempted to build internal solutions for managing development environments and discovered firsthand how difficult it is to scale effectively. That’s when they turn to Coder—a cloud development environment designed to solve these challenges and more.
Here’s what draws these companies to Coder:
- Improved Developer Experience - These companies are laser-focused on giving developers the best tools to stay productive. Coder reduces support tickets for platform engineering teams by delivering consistent, predictable environments that just work. Developers can move quickly, spin up new environments in minutes, and avoid the pain of troubleshooting or rebuilding broken local environments.
- Ephemeral and Consistent Environments - The ability to spin up clean, ephemeral environments is invaluable. Developers can experiment freely, knowing they can destroy and recreate environments at any time without fear of downtime or unexpected behavior.
- Open Source and Extensibility - Tech innovators care deeply about how their software stack works. With Coder being open source, they can inspect the code, scan for vulnerabilities, and even extend the platform to meet their specific needs—whether that’s wrapping the CLI, adding a custom UI, or integrating with internal developer platforms like Backstage.
- Self-Hosted for Security - Many of these companies have strict security requirements, making Coder’s self-hosted model a major advantage. Sensitive code and data stay within their controlled infrastructure—Coder can be hosted on any cloud or on-premises—ensuring compliance and reducing exfiltration risks.
- Cost Efficiency - Over-provisioning VMs on a one-to-one developer-to-VM ratio can drive up costs quickly. Coder’s ability to manage resources more effectively—like running multiple workspaces on a single VM or shutting down idle environments—helps these companies control cloud spend without sacrificing performance.
- Powerful Cloud Resources - For ML-heavy workloads and GPU-intensive tasks, even the most expensive local machines can’t compete with the scalability of the cloud. Coder gives these teams access to the horsepower they need, enabling faster AI/ML training and experimentation.
- GenAI Tool Distribution - Many of these companies are early adopters of generative AI tools like Copilot. With Coder, they can manage these tools centrally—distributing approved versions, pushing updates across all workspaces, and maintaining consistent development environments.
Empowering Developers, Enabling Innovation
Innovation thrives when developers can focus on building and experimenting without being held back by clunky tools or complex setups. For the world’s largest tech companies, this means having development environments that are consistent, reliable, and ready to handle anything.
Coder’s open-source, cloud-based platform delivers the flexibility these companies need. By enabling developer productivity and autonomy, Coder helps leading tech companies stay ahead in an ever-changing landscape.
To hear more about how other innovative companies improve developer experience with Coder, contact us 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!
