Gitpod SaaS is being deprecated. What are your options?

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Gitpod announced that its SaaS version will be disabled by April 2025. Consider Harness Cloud Development Environments as the alternative.

Gitpod SaaS (Classic) is being EOL’d

On Oct 1st, 2024, Gitpod announced that the SaaS version of its Cloud Development Environments (CDE) product, now called Gitpod Classic, will be disabled by April 2025.

From their announcement: “Gitpod Classic is the name of our previous pay-as-you-go plan. It will remain unchanged until April 2025. Gitpod Flex will replace Gitpod Classic in April 2025.”

The replacement, Gitpod Flex, will NOT be offered as SaaS. This means that you will need to self-host the infrastructure for CDEs that are created on your behalf. In fact, Gitpod specifically states that all configurations are now self-hosted: “All Gitpod offerings are self-hosted including Gitpod Enterprise, Gitpod Flex, and our Free tier.”

What are your options if you like the convenience and efficiency of a SaaS solution and do not want to self-host CDE infrastructure?

Especially if you’re using Bitbucket, which doesn’t even have its own CDE offering?

Fortunately, we’ve got you covered!

Keep Using SaaS CDEs Without Disruption

We recently announced our new product, Harness Cloud Development Environments, a SaaS-based CDE solution for customers using GitHub, Bitbucket, Gitlab, or Harness Code Repository.

Harness Cloud Development Environments (CDE) provides pre-configured, remote, and secure cloud-based environments for code writing and debugging that are accessible from anywhere. Each environment is ready-to-code, with all libraries, tools, dependencies, the latest copy of your source code, and even your favorite IDE!

Why use Harness CDEs?

Harness CDEs provide all the same capabilities of Gitpod and more, enabling teams with:

On-demand, instant, properly configured development environments
Ability to use local IDEs or cloud-provided IDEs, which are seamlessly connected to cloud environments (Gitspaces™)
Environment templates to always start with the latest versions of libraries, tools, and dependencies.
Ability to easily switch between different projects or branches without local environment conflicts
Access to powerful cloud resources to handle resource-intensive tasks
Security by keeping all source code off local machines and enterprise-grade SSO and role-based access control
Integrated AI code assistant with code suggestions and automated code quality checks

In addition, you get many core capabilities of the Harness platform for free. In upcoming releases, you’ll also see several advanced capabilities light up as we leverage synergies across modules to enhance our CDE offering.

Who’s Harness?

Harness is the leading end-to-end modern platform for complete software delivery (named a Leader in the 2024 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for DevOps Platforms). Harness provides a simple, safe, and secure way for engineering and DevOps teams to release applications into production. Harness uses AI and machine learning to help developers create, secure, release, and monitor the quality of deployments, saving time and reducing the need for custom scripting and manual oversight.

Do I Have to Use the entire Harness platform?

No, you don’t have to adopt any other Harness modules to use Harness Cloud Development Environments.

Harness is designed from the ground up to enable teams to pick and use the best tools for them, and easily integrate those with their Harness modules of choice. Of course Harness has modules that cover almost the entire software delivery lifecycle and we drive hard to make sure that each module stands on its own as best of breed, so we hope you’ll take a look. But there are no requirements to use anything beyond the modules you’re truly interested in.

How do I migrate?

The only thing you’ll have to change is adopt the industry-standard devcontainer.json format to specify CDE configuration. Gitpod itself is moving to this format from its current proprietary config file, so this is not really extra effort just to migrate to Harness.

Once you have the config, all you need to do is sign in and start using Harness CDEs!

Get Started with Harness CDE Today

Don't let the discontinuation of Gitpod SaaS halt your progress. Harness CDE offers a reliable and efficient solution to keep your development on track without switching your SCM.

Harness CDE is in beta today, with a full GA release scheduled well in advance of the end of Gitpod SaaS. This offers an opportunity for you to help shape Harness CDE so that it meets your needs.

Take the next step: