Integrative softwares and tools like Dev Containers and GitPod can be invaluable for development teams/tasks, commonly used for its benefits in ensuring portability and uniformity in team based development environments – amongst others. However setting these tools up to be ready to begin working can be time consuming; furthermore, development projects often require running several hardware-intensive applications simultaneously which can cause delays due to hardware constraints and inconsistencies across teammates. These factors can quickly eat into time allocated for team/project work and create a weak link in a team if one (or more) teammates are falling behind trying to get set up.
Recently, this is something that I’ve experienced and observed frequently in class as we incorporate more toolkits and work on more intensive projects. With Dr. Wurst’s suggestion of implementing GitPod as a way of addressing these difficulties, I decided to do some reading into what GitPod is and other solutions.
Coder is another cloud-based developer environment which is an alternative to GitPod with some key differences. In Coder vs. GitPod: Which is Better for Your Team? Computer Science professionals Ben Potter and Mark Milligan consider the pros and cons of both with a focus on helping readers choose the best fit for their development teams. GitPod targets individuals and small teams with SaaS offerings focusing on an easy start and integration with several IDEs and containers, making it a great fit for web application development. Plus, with their current offering of 50 hours free monthly (and modestly affordable packages if this isn’t enough) there’s minimal price barrier.
On the other hand, Coder is oriented towards large-scale teams and organizations/enterprises, offering a self-hosted solution for on-premises or public cloud deployment. It prioritizes security and flexibility, allowing workspaces to be operated on a variety of infrastructures like Docker and other VMs. Being business-focused, Coder also provides several enterprise related features like single-sign-on, audit logs, usage metrics and more while supporting several IDE’s and containers, VM’s, etc.
It’s important to keep in mind that the original post was hosted on the Coder blog medium and may be biased as such, though the authors seem to try to take a fair stance and highlight the cases where GitPod would likely be more applicable than Coder. This comparison helped me get a better understanding of some of the capabilities and advantages of tools like GitPod/Coder. Plus, learning about Coder as an alternative to GitPod focused on large-scale enterprises that may be geographically spread out is awesome as an individual who intends on entering the CS field after graduating this coming Spring.
Check out more on Coder here: https://coder.com/why
Resources:
1. https://coder.com/blog/coder-or-gitpod-which-is-better-for-your-team
From the blog CS@Worcester – Tech. Worth Talking About by jelbirt and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.