December 2022 Summaries

Microsoft Corporation is hosting a Meetup at its Austin Office on September 24th, 2024. Visual Studio, developed by Microsoft since 1997, has been an influential integrated development environment (IDE) for multiple languages. Coder v2 allows developers to run Windows and Visual Studio in any virtual machine infrastructure they prefer, such as AWS, Google Cloud, or Azure. The integration of Terraform enables the creation of workspaces with specific configurations like cloud region, machine type, and software releases. This approach offers a lower total cost of ownership and better return on investment for remote development platforms compared to alternatives that may only support one cloud provider, operating system, Git provider, or IDE.

The text discusses a Meetup at the Austin Office, focusing on how to control on-premises or public cloud computing costs. It highlights that moving development environments off local machines can lead to increased computing costs in public cloud infrastructure. Public cloud providers are offering solutions like VMs with IDE integration, but these options may not be cost-effective and lack controls to limit compute costs. Coder OSS provides an auto-stop feature for developers' workspaces after a predefined time of inactivity. The text also discusses how to size Kubernetes infrastructure based on input variables like compute required for an average development environment, number of users, and load volume. It emphasizes the importance of adjusting resource requests in workspace templates to save cloud costs. Finally, it mentions that Coder OSS allows specifying workspace resource costs and setting group-level quotas to prevent exceeding budgets.

In 2022, Coder shared insights from their telemetry data on code-server usage. The most active country was the United States, followed by China. The most popular shells were /bin/bash and /usr/bin/bash, while Python was the most popular extension. Other top extensions included Jupyter, C++, and GitLens. In terms of codebase improvements, 2022 saw 27 releases with a focus on making it easier to release faster. Changes included using OpenVSX as the default extension marketplace, upstreaming patches to VS Code, adding a flag to disable file downloads, automatically forwarding ports, and improving the release process. Coder also released instructions for running your own vscode marketplace with code-marketplace.

The US Department of Defense has awarded four companies with $9 billion cloud-computing contracts for a new architecture called Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability. This decision reverses an earlier award to Microsoft for the JEDI contract. Many cloud providers offer Software-as-a-Service remote development solutions, but these may not be available on isolated government data centers. Coder, a self-hosted software, allows institutions participating in multi-cloud contracts to deploy one remote development platform across multiple clouds, reducing total cost of ownership and training requirements.

On September 24th, a Meetup will take place at the Austin Office. Quotas in Coder have been enhanced for better cloud spend control. New installation methods for Windows simplify setup. Performance features are being developed to support up to 3,000 users. Documentation on using Prometheus with Coder and measuring its usage has been added. Users can now preview Terraform and Markdown files within a template version from the dashboard. Subscribers can receive updates via the monthly newsletter.

The text discusses a paradox in remote development environments, where enterprises are moving their infrastructure to public clouds but still managing software development on laptops. It highlights that public cloud providers like AWS and Google Cloud offer advantages over on-premises infrastructure, such as advanced experience and faster innovation rates. Coder's OSS and Enterprise solutions allow businesses of any size to centrally manage and secure development environments on both public clouds and on-premises infrastructure. The text also contrasts Coder's "neutral Switzerland" approach with alternative remote development solutions that only run on public clouds as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). It explains that enterprises prefer self-hosting remote development platforms like Coder in their public clouds for reasons such as control, total cost of ownership, and developer tooling choice. The text concludes by stating that remote development is moving to the public cloud, and enterprises will manage Coder in a self-hosted way for better security and cost control.

The article discusses various solutions for providing code-server, a web-based version of Visual Studio Code (VS Code), to multiple users. These include running separate instances on different ports, using Docker containers, setting up a local Kubernetes cluster with minikube, and using Coder, which provisions remote development environments via Terraform. The pros and cons of each approach are explored, and the article encourages readers to choose the solution that best suits their team's needs.