Jul 12, 2023

CDE Universe 2023: the state of Cloud Development Environments

Pauline Narvas

This June 1 and 2, we welcomed 60 people to our first ever in-person conference, CDE Universe in San Francisco.

Engineers from Uber, Slack, Shopify, and more each shared the challenges and benefits of building their own Cloud Development Environments for their teams.

For some companies, the internal CDE platform was primarily about unlocking developer productivity. For others, CDEs offered a chance to unblock teams as codebases scaled beyond what was manageable on a single developer laptop. Each shared the challenges and successes in deploying CDEs to their development teams.

Uber: Devpod

Matas Strukčinskas from Uber shared how they built a platform deployed to multiple regions, to minimize development latency for Uber’s global development teams.

Devpod is Uber’s platform for developers, and it’s a long-lived development environment with different “flavors”. Each subteam can use the language that fits best for them, and get up and running quickly.

An engineer shared, “I gave up trying to use a macbook for development. Just stick with devpod. That thing is awesome!” With reduced onboarding time and faster build times, Devpod is becoming the default development environment for engineers at Uber.

Slack: remote development with CDEs

Similar to Uber, Slack reported that 85% of their engineers use cloud development environments.

Slack engineers benefitted from the five minute onboarding time, low context switching as isolated environments were ready for every feature or project, low maintenance due to the lack of local dependencies to maintain and were easier to scale with a single configuration change.

The choices increase as CDEs become more popular. The future of CDEs at Slack is either to build or buy but whichever choice, CDEs are here to stay.

Shopify: Isospin

Shopify’s Olga Pilipenco shared how their org has been asking a single question over and over on the DevAccel team:

She shared how Shopify has iterated on their in-house CDE, focusing first on the developer experience, to ensure that Shopify developers are able to build, test, and ship features to products in a rapidly growing ecosystem.

To watch the rest of the conference talks, check out this YouTube playlist.

Join the CDE Universe 🪐

As Matas put at the end of his talk, “Engineering is not only about making things work; it’s about making things better.” With improved developer efficiency, faster onboarding, automation, better collaboration and improved security, CDEs make things better. We’re excited to have shown a glimpse of what the future of software engineering looks like!

Stay in the loop in our Cloud Development Environment Universe, follow us on Twitter, join our Gitpod community Discord server or our developer experience community. To stay notified on the next event, sign up for email updates.

Interested in starting your CDE journey with Gitpod? Let’s chat!