December 2020 Summaries

Microsoft's investment in GitHub Codespaces is helping to popularize the concept of automated, cloud-based dev environments. Since its inception in July 2017, Gitpod has been pioneering this approach and believes that fully-automated developer environments will be standard for professional developers within the next five to ten years. Gitpod is an open-source platform that works with multiple clouds and supports GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket. It offers powerful dev environments with a small ecological footprint and is fast due to its prebuild feature. The company aims to automate the provisioning of dev environments that blend in with existing workflows, integrate into existing infrastructure, and run on any cloud or personal clusters. Gitpod's ultimate goal is to democratize software development by allowing anyone to get into a productive coding state quickly and securely.

Gitpod has introduced new features to improve its dev environment management system. Users can now run commands using sudo and install additional tools with their favorite package managers. Docker images can be run and built within workspaces, allowing users to start containers directly from the workspace. VS Code is now supported alongside Theia, and users can switch between them in settings or bring their own web IDE through a Docker image. Additionally, Gitpod has added support for connecting self-managed GitLab applications with gitpod.io. Future updates will include enhancements to prebuilds, SSH access to workspaces, and a redesign of the dashboard.