Coder powers secure, scalable development across key industries — automotive, finance, government, and technology — enabling faster builds, tighter compliance, and seamless AI adoption in enterprise-grade cloud environments.
This document provides a high level overview of Coder's architecture.
Diagram
coderd
coderd is the service created by running coder server. It is a thin
API that connects workspaces, provisioners and users. coderd stores its state in
Postgres and is the only service that communicates with Postgres.
It offers:
Dashboard
HTTP API
Dev URLs (HTTP reverse proxy to workspaces)
Workspace Web Applications (e.g easily access code-server)
Agent registration
provisionerd
provisionerd is the execution context for infrastructure modifying providers.
At the moment, the only provider is Terraform (running terraform).
At the moment, provisionerd cannot be separated from coderd. Follow this GitHub issue for more details.
Agents
An agent is the Coder service that runs within a user's remote workspace.
It provides a consistent interface for coderd and clients to communicate
with workspaces regardless of operating system, architecture, or cloud.
It offers the following services along with much more:
While coderd and Postgres can be orchestrated independently,our default installation
paths bundle them all together into one system service. It's perfectly fine to run a production deployment this way, but there are certain situations that necessitate decomposition:
Reducing global client latency (distribute coderd and centralize database)
Achieving greater availability and efficiency (horizontally scale individual services)
Workspaces
At the highest level, a workspace is a set of cloud resources. These resources
can be VMs, Kubernetes clusters, storage buckets, or whatever else Terraform
lets you dream up.
The resources that run the agent are described as computational resources,
while those that don't are called peripheral resources.
Each resource may also be persistent or ephemeral depending on whether
they're destroyed on workspace stop.
