Cloud Development Environments in the Gartner Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies…and what that means for you

In mid-August, Gartner published its new “Hype Cycle” report. With this, Gartner wants to show at which stage technologies are, which relevance they have and thus offers a basis for the evaluation of these technologies.

Cloud Development Environments (CDEs) are included. CDEs provide instant access to a development environment, with minimal setup and configuration effort.

The mention of CDEs in the Gartner Hype Cycle is exciting because:

• Studies have shown it for a long time, now it is actively perceived that developers are often frustrated – by long waiting times for local builds, by eternally long set-up times of the local development environment, by a branch change – necessary for bug fixing in an old version, etc. It is perceived that CDEs bring productivity improvements and sustainably improve the developer experience.
• It is perceived that CDEs bring an increase in productivity and sustainably improve the developer experience. This helps companies twice: by increasing productivity, the shortage of IT specialists can be cushioned and developer satisfaction increases.

Win-win, then. Of course. Let’s remain critical: The workforce problem cannot be solved completely. And: It is always an initial effort to switch to a new tool. But that doesn’t seem to be an obstacle: Global players like Slack and Uber have been using RDEs for some time.

The topic is present and there is a lot of discussion about it in the developer community. It is a trending topic.

What does that mean for you?

• Inform: There is writing and discussion about the topic on platforms such as X (Twitter), LinkedIn, Medium, and dev.to. Use the search function with the keywords “Cloud Development Environments” or “Remote Development Environments” to see recent postings. If possible, follow the hashtags used in the postings. A free tool for news monitoring is Google Alerts. Just enter the keyword here and you will receive recent news in your inbox. Our recommendations: Gergely Orosz on X (Twitter) and Kaspar von Grünberg on LinkedIn. And we also regularly inform about the topic on Twitter, LinkedIn and in our blog 😉
  Observe: Observe the productivity of your team of developers. Or better: the obstacles, the stones that lie in the way of being able to work efficiently. A few suggestions: Which tools cause headaches more often? How often do you just wait for things to happen? Which errors occur constantly and recurrently? Which steps in a process are actually unnecessary? What are issues that often cause frustration within the team?
• Apply: Observed enough? Then it’s on to implementation. What do you need to remove obstacles? What is necessary for optimization and what do you need to consider? How will it benefit your team, your department, your company? Experience shows that it is more difficult to change processes in larger companies. You know best where to start and who to bring on board. CDEs could offer you added value as a tool? Just send us a mail. In a conversation, we’ll discuss together how CDEs can support your project.