Palantir's Journey to the Cloud: Leveraging Coder for Improved Development

Palantir Technologies provides big data analytics products for enterprise, government, defense, security, and healthcare. A story in the Palantir Blog shares their experience of moving development environments to the cloud. Coder ended up giving them the flexibility and leverage they needed to manage complex development setups, control costs, and improve developer experience.

Developers at Palantir used to work with fairly high-end MacBooks, often combined with extra resources like GPUs for machine learning projects. Complex development environments suffer from “configuration drift”, making them less consistent and more likely to cause hard-to-find bugs. Onboarding was time consuming, not just for new hires but for developers moving from project to project.

After considering some options, including bigger laptops and offloading development infrastructure to SaaS platforms, Palantir chose Coder. With the switch to Coder they’ve seen quantitative and qualitative improvements:

• Reduced burden of managing development environments
• Reduced the incidents of “works on my machine”
• Reduced compile times

You can see more details about Palantir’s experience, including details about the challenges they deal with and how they solved them.

Challenges

• Large, complex development environments need lots of cloud computing and storage
• Too many variations in developer environments, “Works on my machine”
• Costly onboarding and project-switching

Outcomes

• Lower overhead for cloud compute and storage resources
• Customizable but standardized development environments.
• Simpler integration with other platforms

Industry

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