Introducing Harness Cloud Development Environments

Today, we are excited to announce the Beta release of our new module - Harness Cloud Development Environments, or Harness CDE for short.

Harness CDE improves developer experience, accelerates onboarding, and enhances security with ready-to-use, secure, cloud-hosted development environments that can be launched with a single click. Each environment, also called a Gitspace^TM, comes pre-configured with everything you need to start coding, including your dependencies, tools, libraries, your latest source code, and even your favorite IDE!

This blog will focus on what CDEs are and their value to inner-loop development.

The Challenges With Local Development Environments 

At Harness, we are on a mission to relieve developer toil. Many of our modules currently focus on friction in the outer loop, but we also want to find opportunities to improve developer experience and eliminate toil in the inner loop.

After talking to several customers, we found that local development environments are a significant source of developer toil. We heard similar challenges across multiple conversations:

• Toil: Developers spend a lot of time installing and maintaining a complex set of libraries, tools, and dependencies on their local machines. This is only getting worse as the tech stack becomes more complex and organizations move to microservices/serverless architectures.
• Environment drift: Any drift of local environments with central environments such as QA or production leads to “works on my machine” bugs, which are time-consuming and frustrating to find and fix.
• Insufficient resources: Developer machines often lack enough memory or CPU to build and debug resource-intensive applications locally, leading to insufficient local verification or the additional work of maintaining secondary environments on more powerful cloud machines.

These challenges have a negative impact on developer experience and productivity:

• We found that it takes a new developer an average of 8 weeks to onboard to a new team, project, or organization. A bunch of this time is spent configuring their local machine so they can start coding. 
• Even after they’re fully onboarded, they spend an average of 5 hours every week reconfiguring or debugging their local environments or fixing those “works on my machine” bugs. Developers dislike this thankless grunt work, and it takes them away from their high-value tasks that deliver customer value!

Why Cloud Development Environments? 

So how do Cloud Development Environments address these challenges?

Let’s look at some of the key characteristics of a CDE/Gitspace:

• On-demand: Gitspaces can be launched anytime you want with a single click. If you’re working on multiple projects or need a fresh environment for any reason, you can get it instantly. Each developer can have multiple Gitspaces if they’re working on multiple tasks that each requires its own custom environment.
• Pre-configured: Each Gitspace is pre-configured with everything you need to start coding, so you do not have to install or maintain anything on your local machine. No more toil!
• Standardized, with zero drift: Gitspace configuration lives with your source code in a file named devcontainer.json, which is an industry-standard spec that defines metadata and settings required to configure a containerized development environment. Every developer gets the exact same environment, which can be kept consistent with central environments such as CI/CD and production, so you do not have to deal with “works on my machine” bugs. What a relief!
• Flexible: Each Gitspace can be spun up with a custom hardware configuration, so you can get bigger machines for resource-intensive applications and smaller machines for trivial ones. You can even upgrade your machine specs for an existing Gitspace, giving you ultimate flexibility!

Harness CDE Increases Developer Productivity & Satisfaction

For organizations who adopt CDEs, all these characteristics lead to the following developer outcomes:

• Faster Onboarding: Developers can start coding on day 1 with a single click! This is not just for new developers joining an organization but also for those switching teams or projects internally. Contractors and remote developers can be onboarded in hours instead of days!
• Higher developer productivity and satisfaction: CDEs eliminate toil! Developers no longer spend time on frustrating and thankless tasks such as reproducing environment-specific issues or reconfiguring their local machines. They can get bigger machines for those resource-intensive applications on demand. 

Eliminating toil and minimizing friction leads to happier and more productive developers!

Harness CDE Makes Your Organization More Secure

Beyond developer toil, security teams are concerned with having proprietary and sensitive information, such as source code, keys, tokens, passwords, etc, on every developer machine. This is especially true for third-party and contract developers. After all, nobody wants to end up on the front page of TechCrunch as the folks whose organization had a security/data breach!

For organizations adopting CDE, all source code and other sensitive information stays in the cloud, not developer machines. You can easily set governance and security policies and enforce best practices, making your proprietary information more secure and less vulnerable to malicious attacks.  

Get started today!

We are excited to see our customers leverage CDEs to improve developer experience, productivity, and security!

You can join our Beta program today to get started. We’d love to hear your feedback and partner with you as we shape the future of cloud development environments.

‍‍Sign up for the CDE Beta

If you would like to learn more about CDE

• Watch the demo
• Read the CDE webpage
• ‍Read the documentation

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