Cloudomation DevStack:
The JetBrains Space Alternative

Jetbrains announced that they will no longer be selling new subscriptions or renewals for Space and discontinue the product. 

JetBrains Space is the CDE product of JetBrains. It is a management layer which allows you to customise and manage CDEs. The product is available on-premise and as SaaS. CDEs run as containers on VMs. Each CDE is a full VM, but the user only has access to a container and can customize only one container on that VM. By not allowing access to the VM layer, the customisation options are limited. 

Customisation of IDE containers is done in a devfile.yml, where you can specify the default instance type, the default IDE and version, specific environment variables and secrets, and a few other (limited) customisation options. The container itself can be customized with a Dockerfile. There, you can customise the operating system (OS) of the CDE container and specify additional libraries and packages to be installed. However it is not possible to deploy multiple containers into the CDE VM. 

Built as an extension of their IDE products, JetBrains Space works only with JetBrains IDEs. Space and IDE licenses have to be purchased separately. 

Cloudomation DevStack is available on-premise, with the option to choose self-hosting or managed on-premise where the vendor takes care of management of the CDE platform, but on the customer’s infrastructure.

DevStack CDEs are full VMs. It is possible to deploy a single devcontainer to the CDE, to deploy software directly to the VM, or to deploy a whole Kubernetes cluster – whatever the user needs. VM-based CDEs also allow to deploy all kind of weird or heavy-duty applications that might not be suited to be run in a single container. Source code is synced to the developer’s local machine via a file mount, allowing the developer to choose any IDE which accesses the source code in the local shared drive. Ssh-capable IDEs such as VS Code or JetBrains IDEs can also be used, with the IDE backend running on the CDE. 

This setup is very similar to local development environments. With ssh access to the VM, working with such a CDE will need little adjustment in developer workflows compared to working locally.