The Future of Cloud IDEs

Cloud IDEs are the future of development. In many cases, today, they are superior to their desktop counterparts. And in the areas where they are not superior, they eventually will be. This is because the same limitation concerns faced by developers using distributed-based IDEs, will be the technologies that give them huge advantages over their desktop cousins.

As a sister post, you might want to read an article I wrote in the Fall of 2013, on the market size for cloud IDEs, that gives the perspective of what the market was like at the time. What is the market size of cloud IDEs? And what are the possible business models?

Evolution of App Development

To make the case for why cloud IDEs will win out, let’s look at the bigger picture. Application development has evolved over the past 15 years shifting the way that applications are designed and teams craft contributions.

“By 2018, the transition to agile, DevOps and Web-scale IT practices will become as disruptive to IT as the adoption of lean was to manufacturing during the 1980s.”
- Gartner, Dec 2014

The transition to agile, DevOps, and Web-scale IT practices increase configuration complexity and demand open contribution structures.

The Pain

This leads to a massive problem. The biggest inhibitor to development productivity is developer environment configuration.

1. Developers- want prepackaged environments ready to code, with nothing to install. They want to reduce startup time and have more hack time.
2. Teams- want to remove coder time wasted on environment setup and maintenance. They want to adopt continuous delivery, open source, microservices, and containers without absorbing the configuration complexity caused by each.

Repeated configuration of developer environments causes productivity loss from developers measured in wasted time, and overpayment of compute due to idle machines.

In 2014:

• There we’re 18.5M developers
• Who spent 15.7B development hours on configuration
• Which wasted 99B Gigabyte hours

With the developer population growing 27% by 2020, waste doubles to 213B Gigabyte hours.

The Solution

The nature of this pain will cause development teams to seek out solutions. The ideal solution is a fast, secure, extensible developer environment cloud. With cloud IDEs, you can contribute to a project in seconds. The cloud creates, shares and scales developer workspaces with automation. Developers can then get a crazy fast, no-thrashing, non-blocking IDE where they can craft code and command microservices to build and debug from anywhere. And DevOps is excited because they can provision developer workspace replicas that are simply shareable and securely managed.

The Technology

A cloud IDE is more than a Web app. It’s a platform as a service. And when the PaaS is orchestrated in conjunction with the browser client, there is an enormous potential that is unleashed.

The modern cloud IDE system architecture the combination of:

• An open source plug-in kernel to enable ecosystem extensions
• A cloud IDE composed of plug-ins running on the kernel
• A recipe-based automation engine to construct projects for the cloud IDE
• A microservices-based, elastic supercomputer to power the automation engine and projects
• A secure, highly available infrastructure to manage the supercomputer
• A continuous delivery updater for the installation of the infrastructure
• SaaS, on-premises, and cloud-marketplace packages distributed by the updater

This leads to an open, modular and composable platform distributable through any channel, whether it is SaaS, on-premises, managed hosting, or white-label.

Developers ultimately will experience development that is boundless beyond the levels of their desktop machine. On a desktop, you have to synchronize VMs which are large and difficult to configure / port. You also have fixed amount of resources which are being requested in contention with your other apps running on the same system.

In a cloud IDE, the developer’s atomic services such as test, syntax analysis, build, run and debug are operated on separate, horizontally scalable microservices. This creates the illusion that the developer is using a single machine through their browser, but they are actually accessing potentially dozens of nodes that are not competing with each other on resources to perform each atomic function in the most optimal fashion.

The cloud is then able to retain state for the developer, provison replicas for others instantly, and orchestrate additional services in an automated fashion so that the developer can spend less time configuring and more time coding.

About the Cost

Some cloud IDEs are charging $20 / month for access to their services. Ultimately a cloud IDE is providing physical resources to the user, which you have to pay for, though the IDE itself is free. Most cloud IDEs use a subscription-based models for charging users, but inevitably the entire market will move to pay-as-you-go pricing, and when that happens it’s possible that most cloud IDEs will be available for pennies.

Where Codenvy Fits

Some unique things about Codenvy that play into this model:

1. Unlimited developers, projects and storage for free
2. Recipe-based provisioning, kind of like puppet for the IDE
3. Instant cloning for any project, so that you never have to say “but it worked on their machine” again
4. Offline mode, where you can clone workspaces offline
5. Open source Eclipse Che kernel, for creating extensions & customization
6. >150K users
7. Works both on-prem and in the cloud
8. Uses Docker to let developers define their own machines and stacks for projects with machines booting when the project is executing
9. Micrsoservices-based with a host of 80 REST APIs available
10. Metered pricing starting at $0.15 per / GB RAM hr

You can try a sample of this experience to see the technology speed, loading time, interaction, and flexibility with this temporary workspace that creates a clone of a Spring Java Web application: Spring Factory

Further Resources

The Codenvy Vision
Codenvy + Docker Microservices = Developer Supercomputer
Your Eclipse IDE + Cloud Scalability = Codenvy Eclipse Plugin
The Codenvy Vision
Codenvy Pricing
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