On February 5th Red Hat released their Kubernetes-native, cloud-based development environment CodeReady Workspaces. CodeReady Workspaces is built upon the Eclipse Che project and has been optimized for OpenShift and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. This release includes shareable templates that contain all runtime components, developer tooling, and source code required to work on an application.
Containers, while essential, shift app dependency burdens from operations to development. For developers, adopting the container paradigm gates writing and debugging code behind a complex abstraction that requires expert Linux knowledge.
CodeReady Workspaces is built upon the Eclipse Che project, to which Red Hat is an active contributor, and the previously acquired Codenvy Cloud-based IDE. According to Stevan Le Meur, product manager at Red Hat, Eclipse Che's core values are to:
- Accelerate project and developer onboarding
- Remove inconsistency between developer environments
- Provide built-in security and enterprise readiness
The addition of workspaces, factories, and stacks help to ease developer onboarding and minimize inconsistencies between environments. A workspace contains the tools needed to code, build, test, run, and debug your applications. A factory is based on a workspace and provides a shareable URL that any authorized user can use to create a new copy of that workspace for their personal development. Factories can also execute tasks allowing automation of setup steps such as repo cloning, building, and server preparation. Workspaces are built upon stacks, which are container images that house the compliers, runtimes, and utilities. Stacks can contain multiple containers allowing you to run microservice architectures that mimic production in your development environment.
Workspaces leverage the recent addition of Workspace.Next to Che. This addition allows Che to run IDE tooling as microservices in their own sidecar containers. This enables the application image to be the same regardless of environment. In addition, each component can be defined by application definitions such as a Composefile or OpenShift YAML.
CodeReady Workspaces includes Red Hat SSO to provide role-based access for both workspaces and factories. Red Hat SSO integrates with both LDAP and Active Directory.
Dayaratna further elaborated that
Red Hat's announcement of the general availability of its CodeReady Workspaces IDE is significant because it marks the convergence of open source technologies built on Eclipse Che, enhanced collaboration capabilities and security-related functionality that is designed to prevent storage of source code on personal devices.
Since CodeReady Workspaces runs within an OpenShift environment, there is no need for either the IDE or the source code to be installed on the developer's machine. According to Brad Micklea, senior director and lead at Red Hat, source code is challenging to secure on local machines. Having the source code only exist on a centralized cluster simplifies the security process.
Interested readers who are registered in the Red Hat Developer Program can download CodeReady Workspaces for free.
