Discord is where thousands of communities collaborate, share, and talk with instant messaging, voice, and video. Denbeigh Stevens at Discord recently blogged about their migration to cloud development environments (CDEs) and, we like to think, Coder was a key part of it.
Engineers at Discord work from geographically separated offices and remotely, from macOS and Linux machines. Before their switch to CDEs, that meant setting up the same tooling to run on different operating systems. The inconsistencies and complications from that, combined with the growth of their engineering organization, led Discord to look seriously at cloud development environments. They wanted to give their engineers consistent, reproducible environments no matter which operating system or location they work from.
Discord decided to switch to VMs in the cloud to run their development environments. To support this move, they started using Coder version 1 in 2020. Today, they’re using Coder v2 to take advantage of its many improvements.
We won’t give away any more spoilers. Take a look at the full details from Denbeigh’s article, including pros, cons, and lessons learned. We’re delighted to see that Discord has built a better developer experience with Coder.
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Challenges
- High support costs for variations in development environments
- Growing pains from rapid company growth
- In-house solutions to work around sub-par Docker performance
Outcomes
- Flexibility to balance environment immutability with developer convenience
- Leverage existing familiarity with VS Code
- Improved developer experience encourages developers to adopt new functionality