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Comment by TylerJewell | Hacker News Reader

The remote dev environment space is heating up. Quite a few variants and competitors now emerging in this generation of vendors. I started and sold Codenvy to Red Hat which implements Eclipse Che and Eclipse Theia as CodeReady Workspaces.

There are increasingly limited differentiation between various vendors. The biggest improvement areas needed now are simpler configuration, faster boot times for complex projects (pre-built code, cached artifacts, IDE plug-ins configured).

Cloud9 IDE Appvia Coder CodeSandbox CodeZero.io DevSpace Desktop Tilt Env0 Floxdev Gitpod Itopia Spaces LocalStack MetalBear Azure DevTest Labs Visual Studio Codespaces Nimbus Okteto SourcePro Porter Codeready Workspaces Repl.it Stackblitz Strong.network Subpoint Solutions Tangram.dev

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Nish from Nimbus here.

Personally, I dont think this is going to be a space where one company "wins the market". Whats best for developers is having flexibility and choosing the right tool for what their building and their team. So I'm hoping that these products become/stay more open and let people pick them up and drop them as needed.

On the differentiation front.. there's some common differentiation points, but to your point there's going to be someone doing things like you when theres more and more competitors.

Also - brilliant job with Codenvy! You're one of the pioneers in the field. When we started Nimbus we did our research (even talking to the folks at Koding, NitrousIDE, etc)

> Whats best for developers is having flexibility and choosing the right tool for what their building and their team.

One of the things that's annoyed me about codespaces and gitpods is that they really require/assume the whole team will use that one product. Codespaces does that through their billing and permissions, and gitpods does it via their PR based features etc. Is this something Nimbus is going to try and avoid? What's best for the majority isn't always best for the individual, and that's why we have so many different IDE's. Perhaps my personal workflow is served better by Nimbus and my colleagues is better suited for codespaces.

With some tools, like bug trackers, it makes sense to pick one tool for everyone of course. What do you think about remote dev environments?

I think more people on remote environments does lead to better overall experience. But the incremental benefit for each additional team member drops until everyone is working on the cloud - because then you can do some cool things or stop doing some dull things.

That said, we avoid doing anything that forces an entire team to move to our cloud environments. That's an easy way to piss people off and build a crappy product. Hopefully this approach doesnt burn us.

There are definitely more alternatives in the market now. But I do see the differentiation pretty clear (maybe because I am building it) Actually I think you are pointing out some great categories for differentiation, simpler config, faster boot time, and so on.

A few more things we learned based on the current market is that the team is way more distributed geographically now. So the latency and collaboration across different geolocation are also two areas we really focus on.

Those are the public ones. We manage our own with packer and Ansible, technical a suite of dev VM images, depending on the role or tasks (i.e. reg vs ML).

I wonder if there are any drop in self-hosted solutions for this? Would be great to just use a tool like this even for personal dev.

self-host is definitely on our roadmap. For the first step, at least we want to deploy the EC2s in your own cloud rather than Nimbus's cloud.

I LOVED Codenvy! Kudos.

Tyler, don't forget about Coherence! (withcoherence.com)

Ha! I maintain a public database and people can navigate it by going to tylerjewell.substack.com. It links into a public google sheet.

The tracking methodology buckets companies by the primary product they advertise. Withcoherence is in a different category that has a broader platform definition.

There are companies like gitlab and Codegiant that also have remote dev envs as features of the broader product line.

Thanks! And appreciate the context here...

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