Cloudomation DevStack:
The Eclipse Che Alternative

Eclipse Che

Eclipse Che is the oldest CDE Open Source project. It started as a web IDE and
developed additional CDE features from there.

It is Kubernetes-based and configuration of the development container is done
via Devfile. Eclipse Che CDEs are Kubernetes pods. Several containers can be
deployed to these pods. This means that multi-container applications can run
within an Eclipse Che CDE, with one development container running alongside
the application containers.

It supports VS Code, JetBrains and Eclipse Theia browser IDEs.

While a great project, talking to engineers who have worked with it we have heard
that it can be difficult to set up and get to work properly, and requires quite a bit
of effort in continuous maintenance as well as expertise in Kubernetes.

Eclipse Che is best for:

• Dev teams working on products that run in Kubernetes in production
• Organisations with dedicated platform engineering (or similar) team(s) with
  Kubernetes expertise who have the resources to manage Che as a service for
  their dev teams
• Organisations with the inclination and resources to support Che internally,
  without relying on support from a vendor

Cloudomation DevStack

Cloudomation DevStack is a highly customisable CDE product. It’s standard deployment model provides full VMs as CDEs to developers. However, the “unit” of a CDE can be customised to whatever the user needs: CDEs can be containers deployed into a Kubernetes cluster, several VMs, or serverless components – or anything else. Customisation of CDE deployment is done using Cloudomation Engine, a Python-based automation engine with broad infrastructure and deployment automation capabilities. Because of this flexibility, DevStack makes it possible to provide suitable CDEs for frontend, backend, data science, and other teams with different infrastructure needs and deployment models, and is particularly suitable for the development of complex, non-standard and/or heavy duty software. 

By asking senior developers how they would like to use a CDE, DevStack focused on features that allow seamless transition to using a CDE, without changing developer’s workflows and allowing them to use their existing tool sets. These features include:

• Synchronisation of the source code between the CDE and the developer’s laptop. Developers have “their hands on the code”, can continue to use any IDE they already have and love, and can work on the code even when offline, reconnecting with their CDE seamlessly when online again. (Note: Synchronisation of source code can be disabled.)
• A powerful command-line interface (CLI) that allows developers to open a terminal directly on the CDE, forward ports, stream logs from the CDE / containers running on the CDE VM, synchronise files between their laptop and the CDE (two-way), to create, start, stop, and delete CDEs directly from the terminal, and store their CDE configuration locally so that CDEs can be spun up with one terminal command. 

Cloudomation is best for:

• Complex, non-standard and/or heavy duty software development
• Companies that look for one CDE platform that can provide different kinds of CDEs to different development teams (e.g. working on different products with different deployment models, or backend and frontend teams etc.)
• Developers with well-working tool sets and development processes that want a CDE that adapts to their workflow and allows seamless transition to working with the CDE