Cloudomation DevStack:
The Strong Network Alternative

Strong Network

Strong Network is a security-focused CDE product. It has a lot of features related to air-gapping the CDEs so that no data can leave the CDE undetected. Strong Network also has a lot of “observability” features, which allow administrators to snoop in great detail on what the developers are doing on the CDEs.

The CDEs feature a fine-grained permissions concept (role-based), which looks fairly complex to manage.

Underneath, it is a classical single-container CDE, which can work with any browser-based or ssh-capable IDE, notably VS Code and JetBrains IDEs. The containerized CDEs run in a Kubernetes cluster. Customization of the workspace is done via a web portal where limited configuration options for workspaces are available.

Our impression of Strong Network is that it focuses a lot less on developer experience and a lot more on the goals of management than other CDE vendors.

The product documentation as well as their website in general give the impression that Strong Network probably has close relationships with their customers, support them individually a lot, and don’t focus on providing information to the public, since their product is not intended to be used in self-service anyway. They do not publish release notes and I was not able to find out when their product was initially released. The company was founded in 2020, so I assume that they left beta sometime in 2021 or 2022.

Strong network is best for:

• Organisations with a strong security focus that want to track their source code closely

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