Space, JetBrains's take on containerized, remote development environments, is now available on-premises as a beta for all organizations that prefer to have full control over their tools instead of relying on third-party Cloud services. The beta includes support for most of the features available in Space Cloud except for development environments, which will be included in the final release, says JetBrains.
Since Space On-Premises will be deployed inside of the user's network, the focus is more on its containerized nature rather than on it providing a remote development experience. In other words, Space On-Premises aims to keep the promise of commoditizing development environments and making it easier to spin up full-fledged environments in short time both for first-time or casual contributors as well across machines for regular contributors.
With this introduction, JetBrains is tackling one of the most usual form of criticism to remote development environments such as JetBrains Space Cloud or GitHub Codespaces, in particular the loss of privacy and ownership on some parts of developers' work. Being on-premises means the user keeps full control of the deployment, although this will have a cost for the operation of the system.
Space On-Premises supports most of the features provided by Space Cloud, including Git hosting, code reviews and issues support, package management, team collaboration, and so on. It has some limitations, though, when it comes to features that require hosting on JetBrains. Specifically, it can only use external workers for automation tasks, at the moment.
Most importantly, the beta release does not support development environments yet, although this feature will be available in the public release, says JetBrains. This is especially relevant for any developers or organizations that want to try out the product in its current beta, since the ability of managing and instantiating ready-to-use development enviroments is one of the most appealing features in this kind of products.
Space On-Premises comes in two fashions, with support for Docker Compose or Kubernetes. The Docker Compose version is most indicated, says JetBrains, for quick trial runs or for smaller organizations. The benefit of Docker Compose lies with the simplicity of its configuration and management, which is bases on a YAML file that describes the available services. The Kubernetes version is, instead, more flexible and supports larger organization that need their installations to scale.
While current Space users have no facilities to migrate from Space Cloud to Space On-Premises, this is something JetBrains is currently working on and that will become available at some point in future.
JetBrains is planning to run the beta for 3-6 months, during which the produce is available through a free license. At the end of this period, Space On-Premises will remain free for organizations of up to 10 users and offer specific plans for larger organizations and enterprises.
