What happened in Vegas
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.
A stronger partner ecosystem
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:
- Big updates to their co-selling program that will supercharge how their sales and product teams collaborate with their ecosystem partners
- 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.
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.
The next steps for AI in software development
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.
The flexibility of self-managed development environments
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 here.
The evolving developer stack
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 Cursor. Secure browsers like Island round out the device side by replacing previous-generation solutions like VDI.
DevEx is the whole point
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 seen many times is happier, more productive developers and infrastructure that costs significantly less than traditional, local-centric developer stacks.
Conclusion
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 Coder on AWS Marketplace to accelerate development workflows.
2025 will be exciting! Stay tuned!
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