What Makes a Great CDE for Enterprise Users
A deeper look at Coder, including what makes Coder Premium the most flexible, effective CDE for enterprise users.
Intro
In previous articles we covered what a CDE is, its benefits, and a few ways to develop in the cloud. Now we can talk specifically about Coder Premium, a CDE platform for enterprise users.
Coder history
It’s a common story: Coder was developed by developers to solve a developer’s problem.
Coder co-founders Ammar Bandukwala, Kyle Carberry, and John Andrew Entwistle met in high school. Frustrated by the complications of collaborating remotely, they looked to cloud technologies to solve common obstacles like “works for me”, repeating solutions for the same problems, and just getting up to speed quickly.
In 2017 they started to build what eventually became Coder, a platform to consistently and easily provision remote development environments. Coder is now used by many of the world’s largest organizations in financial services, autonomous drones, social media, and more.
Coder philosophy
From the beginning, Coder puts power in the hands of developers, bringing the advantages of the cloud while freeing them from the obstacles of managing and monitoring development environments. Coder aims to be flexible, scalable, secure, and easy to use for everyone, not just developers.
Coder is based on industry-standard technologies for provisioning, networking, and security. It’s open source, with both Coder engineers and an active community making contributions. This puts power in the hands of the platform engineering team, giving them transparency and more choices on the architecture and deployment of their organization’s developer infrastructure.
Coder is cloud-native, but it runs anywhere. Host Coder on your infrastructure, on a hyperscaler, or any combination. Workspaces can run anything that can be provisioned by a Terraform template. That means your development environments can use any software and tool that is supported by macOS, Windows, or Linux. To give you an idea of how to take advantage of this flexibility, take a look at Coder Registry, a directory of ready-to-use templates and modules to integrate Coder with third party platforms and developer tools.
Choose your hosting, control your spend
Coder is not a SaaS, it’s 100% self-hosted and self-maintained software. You choose the hosting infrastructure based on your own in-house resources, budget, security, and performance needs. Among other benefits, this gives the enterprise more choices for raising performance when it’s needed or using more cost-effective services. For example, you get to choose the cloud storage types that meet your performance, security, or cost requirements.
Coder Premium gives the enterprise platform engineering team plenty of options for using resources efficiently:
- Workspace scheduling tears down development environments when they aren’t needed.
- Build parameters give developers the choice to use extra resources when they choose, within guardrails set by the platform engineering team.
- Assign quotas to limit usage to a predetermined point.
- Use groups and roles management to give specific users access to more resource-intensive workspaces.
Security
There are several aspects to Coder’s security, from its flexibility for deployment and how it interacts with external services, to the auditability of its open source code.
All user-workspace connections are end-to-end encrypted. For better performance while maintaining secure connections, when possible, Coder makes direct connections between users and workspaces.
For monitoring and managing access, Coder Premium provides audit logging and group- and role-based access control to support general IT governance policies.
From a deployment standpoint, an enterprise has a range of solutions for security, from third party cloud-based services for repos and registries to running air-gapped environments completely offline. Coder’s flexibility and cloud-native approach make this possible, letting an enterprise implement architectures for development environments without exposing these complexities to developers.
Finally, Coder is auditable by anyone, not just customers. It’s open source, so issues, pull requests and reviews, and discussions are open for anyone to view.
Productivity starts with ease of use
Developer productivity and experience is important. We’ve designed and implemented Coder to support developers first, giving them consistent, ready-to-use, familiar development environments.
Developers can start a complete development environment at the literal click of a button in Coder’s web interface. They interact with their workspace from their preferred IDE or editor, including VS Code (native or browser-based), JetBrains IDEs, SSH, or even just a browser-based terminal.
Coder creates workspaces from templates that the platform engineering team defines. The team can manage and monitor all workspaces from a single place. Coder Premium adds other administrative features like bulk operations to update, delete, start, and stop multiple workspaces in one shot.
Stability
Like security, there’s more than one aspect to Coder’s stability. It comes from Coder’s openness and flexibility. Coder is an active open source project. Many eyes see its code every day, both at Coder and in the community. That means transparent development, including open communication for defects and their resolutions.
As for administration, the enterprise self-maintains Coder the way they choose, deciding when to open and close maintenance windows for updates. For example, provider-scheduled maintenance windows won’t interfere with geographically dispersed development teams. Also, the enterprise can stage and test system updates before applying to production.
Scalability
Coder Premium is truly an enterprise ready, globally-scalable CDE. Every day, enterprises use it to manage dozens, hundreds, or thousands of dev environments. Being cloud-native, it works well with Kubernetes. An enterprise can arrange resources with workspace proxies and access control to match the org chart and geographical locations.
Support for enterprise organizations
Enterprise organizations need development infrastructure that goes beyond installation, like coordinating globally-dispersed dev teams, integrating with external authenticators, and ensuring high availability, to name a few. Coder Premium comes with features that support these needs:
- Service level agreement (SLA).
- Ticket-based technical support to connect directly to Coder.
- In-house expertise to guide you through architectural and deployment decisions.
- Custom branding for your organization.
- More sophisticated access and organizational control.
A good CDE gives enterprise developers a great experience
We believe that Coder Premium is the ultimate in CDE flexibility, power, security, and economy for the enterprise. We give you the ability to determine the tooling and resources that your developers get, the infrastructure it runs on, and within the bounds that your enterprise sets.
- Learn about the successes of our enterprise customers.
- Download our ebook for details on choosing an enterprise-grade CDE.
- Stay up to date on our projects, roadmap, and latest releases on GitHub.
- Try out Coder, it takes just minutes to set up.
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