Gitpod recently announced that their cloud-based developer environments are open to every engineer. With a GitLab, GitHub, and/or Bitbucket account, an engineer can have access to coding remotely on their public and private repositories for 50 hours per month for free.
In his blog post, Sven Efftinge, CEO of Gitpod, emphasized the vision of standardizing "ephemeral" cloud-based development environments by 2023. As more and more engineering teams use automation with their infrastructure, CI/CD build pipelines, Efftinge said that development environment automation is yet to reach a similar adoption rate.
In early August 2021, GitHub moved away from the local development environment and adopted Codespaces for its day-to-day development flow. Efftinge welcomed this announcement and enumerated the following motivations for the adoption of ephemeral developer environments:
- Multi-track development: develop and review complicated features with ease
- Local machine limits: support larger workloads, more data, dependencies, and testing
- Security: encourage no source code on laptop policies
- Consistency: end of all "works on my machine" claims
- Onboarding: minimize the initial days of tedious workspace setups
- Remote work: facilitates collaboration with fully distributed or hybrid companies
Efftinge also referenced an illustration of accelerating day-to-day development velocity using Gitpod, put together by Pauline P. Narvas, senior community engineer at Gitpod.
The tech community on Twitter supported the announcement with a number of retweets and likes. One of the Twitter users @simonholdorf tweeted,
"... If you want to reinforce your learning with hands-on practice - which I encourage you to - in different tech stacks I can highly recommend trying out @gitpod for spinning up different environments quickly in your browser. Automation rocks".
A conversation in the vscode Reddit community also weighed the experiences of the users with GitPod and GitHub Codespaces. The topics in the comments ranged from the resource and usage limit to the possibility of adding Nx Console extension to Gitpod.
Furthermore, GitLab expanded their Gitpod integration in their release 14.2. Building on the Gitpod integration introduced in release 13.5, the latest release enables launching preconfigured Gitpod workspace from a merge request.
Interested readers can get started with Gitpod via the organization’s website. There is a Gitpod Discord community, where one can get to know about upcoming Gitpod features and can also take part in live sessions.