Release Recap: 2.16.0, Multi-Org Access Controls, Custom Roles, Premium Plan, and more

author avatar
Jess Sweet
 on October 1st, 2024
6 min read

Today’s newest mainline release is 2.16.0 (changelog), check out what’s included below. At the time of this writing, our latest stable release is 2.15.0, featuring experimental notifications. For more details, revisit last month’s blog post on the 2.15.0 release.

Coder 2.16.0 is now available, and it introduces new access controls and user management features tailored for enterprises running Coder at scale. These features are exclusively offered in the new Coder Premium plan, designed for companies that demand global support and control over how multiple isolated platform teams access their Coder deployment.

Additionally, Notifications have reached Beta with Microsoft Teams and Slack delivery, and Envbuilder – an open-source project that allows developers to safely customize their own cloud workspaces via Dev Containers – has officially launched its v1.0 release.

Coder Premium: A new plan offering more control for secure deployments

We’re excited to introduce the new Premium plan, designed for large enterprises with multiple platform teams. It offers global support, multi-organization access control, custom user roles, and more – ensuring you can efficiently manage scale, security, and collaboration across your organization.

Coder Premium is designed for enterprises with hundreds or thousands of users and multiple platform teams, supporting a single Coder deployment in a multi-tenant model. Coder Premium includes everything our open-source Community plan offers – unlimited Workspaces, Templates, and users – along with dozens of additional features that extend user management, governance, scalability, and cost control.

Coder 2.16.0 brings new features to our Premium plan, including multi-organization access controls, custom user roles, resource quotas per organization, and ticket-based global support with SLAs – more about those additions below.

If you’re new to Coder, we invite you to start a free 30-day trial of Coder Premium. If you’re a current Coder customer and wish to learn more about Coder Premium, please contact your Customer Success Manager.

New Premium Features in Coder 2.16.0

Multi-organization access controls

With today’s release, Coder Premium customers can create multiple organizations within a single Coder deployment, allowing platform teams to isolate users, credentials, templates, workspaces, and infrastructure. Unlike groups, users within an organization can hold roles that provide access to all resources specific to their organization without extending access to the broader Coder deployment.

For example, data science and developer platform teams can now coexist on a single Coder instance, each using different provisioners, tools, and infrastructure while remaining fully isolated.

With multi-organization access controls, enterprises can reduce the operational overhead and security risks of maintaining multiple decentralized Coder deployments. This release allows enterprises to scale more efficiently while preserving the integrity and security of each platform team. Check out our documentation for more details.

Custom roles

Custom roles offer greater flexibility for managing contractors, service accounts, and unique use cases. You can create finely tuned permission sets with custom roles, allowing users to access only the resources and actions essential to their role within the Coder deployment. Whether managing contractors, auditors, or automated pipelines, custom roles help reduce risk and ensure compliance by adhering to the principle of least privilege.

Read our documentation to learn more.

Resource quotas per organization

With the introduction of resource quotas per organization, Coder now allows quotas to be set at the organization level rather than just at the group level. This offers better visibility and control over each platform team’s resource usage. This feature also enables chargeback tracking for Coder administrators, allowing infrastructure costs to be directly attributed to each organization’s budget holders. This improves accountability and ensures more efficient cost management across teams. Read our documentation for more details.

New for 2.16.0: Updates to Notifications, including Teams and Slack Betas

Notifications have reached Beta in 2.16.0 for all users. In addition to the notifications introduced in 2.15.0, we’ve added summary reports to aggregate build failure events on your templates. This will help administrators asynchronously diagnose transient errors without requiring users to file support tickets. We’ve also opened beta support for notification delivery in Microsoft Teams and Slack workspaces.

Later this year, we’re planning to introduce custom notifications with delivery directly into the IDE. This will open a new source of visibility into workspace health and critical time-sensitive events for developers. You can follow implementation progress in our GitHub.

More Open Source Updates

Enable developers to customize workspaces via Dev Containers

We’re also thrilled to announce the first release of Envbuilder, an open-source project developed by our founder Kyle Carberry. Envbuilder leverages the open Dev Container standard, allowing developers to manage their own dependencies and environments without needing platform team intervention. For example, developers can pull in tools that are already approved from sources like Artifactory, reducing reliance on platform teams. This results in faster project delivery, improved developer experience, and reduced ticket queues, all without compromising security.

Try out Envbuilder for yourself! Get started on GitHub or see the Coder docs for integrating it with your Coder templates.

Use aicommit and never write commit messages again

To help engineers spend more time writing code and less time writing commit messages, Coder Co-founder and CTO Ammar Bandukwala created aicommit: a small CLI tool that writes commit messages for you. Simply install the tool, provide an API token, and aicommit to generate a message based on your changes.

Check out the project on GitHub and stay in flow.

Use Cursor in Coder with our latest module

By request of the Coder community, we now support the Cursor AI Code Editor with a module in our registry. The module uses our VSCode Desktop extension under the hood, so no extra configuration is required. To use Cursor in your Coder workspaces, just add the module and connect.

Get started with the README in our registry.

Other Bug Fixes

As always, we release bug fixes and patches throughout the month to ensure Coder continues to run smoothly. Check out our Coder releases on GitHub for full details on the latest patches. Found a bug? Tag it here to let us know!

That concludes this month’s Release Recap. We can’t wait for you to try out our new features!

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