All eBooks and Reports
CDEs Recognized as a Top 5 Software Engineering Trend in Gartner Report
Software engineering organizations can’t afford to wait for market trends to sort themselves out. According to Gartner®, “By investing in disruptive technologies, software engineering leaders can empower their teams to meet business objectives for productivity, sustainability and growth.” But where should they invest?
In a new report, Gartner identifies the top five strategic technology trends that we believe should guide software engineering strategic decision making in 2024. One key trend is the growing popularity of Cloud Development Environments (CDEs). Investing in CDEs in 2024 can help organizations provide a consistent developer experience and simplify the onboarding process.
Additional factors we believe are driving the adoption of CDEs:
Collaboration and Remote Work
Remote work and remote onboarding of software developers creates a need for a frictionless onboarding experience. The ability to share the development environment among distributed team members makes remote debugging and pair programming easier.
Customization
Organizations increasingly need custom configured hardware to support specific application architectures. In the report, Gartner notes that “Cloud development environments provide custom preconfigured hardware to support specific application architectures.” These include Apple M1/M2 silicon for mobile app development or GPU support for data and analytics workloads.
Security
The ability to centrally manage, govern, and secure development environments has become especially important to minimize the threat of software supply chain attacks. Gartner states that “Cloud development environments enable platform and security teams to govern and secure user access to development environments” and also secure personally owned devices.
Automation
Automating DevOps workflows introduces more complexity. Gartner notes that, “With the addition of numerous plug-ins, extensions, and API integrations, updating and configuring local machines has become cumbersome and unreliable” and CDEs “seamlessly integrate with Git-based repositories and continuous integration/continuous delivery tools” stated in the report.
Ease of Integration
CDEs integrate to existing engineering trends and practices easily, creating harmony with remaining top trends from Gartner: software engineering intelligence, AI-augmented development, green software engineering, and platform engineering.
