Codespaces, Gitpod, Devpod what cloud and container-based IDEs can do for you by Matthias-Haeussler

Over the last 2 years cloud-based integrated development environments (IDEs) such as Gitpod or GitHub Codespaces have gained a lot of popularity. Devpod is the most recent Open Source technology in this field and there will very likely be more additions in the near future. With this talk I would like compare and contrast the features of these technologies as opposed to traditional ones and highlight how container technology serves as the base technology to make this happen. This includes the devcontainer specification. Furthermore, I will explore the advances made in this field and discuss the limitations that still exist. The intended take-away for the audience is to see the ease and efficiency for developing polyglot, container-based distributed applications. The live demo will show how a developer can start coding away in seconds without the need to set up any build environment for a magnitude of predefined programming languages and frameworks. This includes immediate showcasing of the development results, testing ability and deployment to external Kubernetes environments. Additionally, I will demonstrate how custom additions can be made if something is still missing. This highlights how advanced this field has become in recent years and where there is still room for improvement. Moreover, I will discuss how cloud IDEs have helped me in teaching distributed systems at university, by ensuring that all my students have a consistent development setup. This will also showcase how these environments can be used to standardize development environments in team projects, making the development process more efficient and streamlined.