The First Kubernetes-Native Developer Environment

From a newly introduced technology to a widely relied upon platform in just a few years, Kubernetes has become an integral part of many organization’s cloud-native solutions - including container-based development environments.

The challenge with building and deploying applications in any Kubernetes distribution is that it’s difficult for a developer to set up a Kubernetes environment that enables fast, iterative development cycles. As a result, some development teams fall back to using containers on their laptops and only seeing how things run in Kubernetes after they’ve merged code back to the origin code repository and triggered a continuous integration (CI) job.

This is problematic as Kubernetes has unique execution behaviors that might necessitate code changes or optimizations. Waiting to do these until after code is merged back to master is inefficient and can introduce problems in the master branch that affect other developers.

Red Hat CodeReady Workspaces is the industry’s first Kubernetes-native integrated development environment (IDE). It makes it easy for developers to have a fast, “locally hosted-style” development experience directly inside Kubernetes and helps development teams avoid the “it works on my machine” problem.

Red Hat CodeReady Workspaces puts the developer’s environment inside Red Hat OpenShift (the world's most comprehensive enterprise Kubernetes platform) from the start and makes iterative edit, build and debug cycles as fast as on a laptop based on customer experiences. Additionally, CodeReady Workspaces are replicable and shareable developer environments that can speed up developer onboarding to a project and increase cross-team collaboration.

Red Hat CodeReady Workspaces includes:

• Centralized developer environments running in OpenShift Container Platform or OpenShift Dedicated.
• Multi-container workspaces for each developer that can be replicated with a single click using workspace Factories.
• Pre-built developer workspace stacks based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 Beta.
• The ability to create custom stacks for any language or runtime.
• Enterprise integration via Keycloak Single Sign-On (SSO) for Active Directory (AD) or Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP).
• The option to use the built-in browser-based IDE, or mount-and-sync between OpenShift and a desktop IDE via oc rsync (if enabled on the OpenShift cluster).
• Source code is hosted outside hard-to-secure endpoint devices like developer laptops.
• Other capabilities of Eclipse Che 6.x.

When Red Hat acquired Codenvy in 2017, Codenvy was the first enterprise offering based on the open source Eclipse Che project. Codenvy included enterprise grade features that weren’t available elsewhere. Red Hat has since contributed that proprietary code to the Eclipse Che project. Red Hat CodeReady Workspaces takes the features of Eclipse Che and adds out-of-the-box runtime stacks (which can be used as a start of a developer’s environment) based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Of course it’s all supported by Red Hat’s expert support team.

With the release of Red Hat CodeReady Workspaces, companies with global workforces once struggling to increase their agility and collaboration can have the capabilities to more efficiently onboard remote developers, saving money and freeing up management and support staff to focus on business needs.