Cloudomation DevStack:
The JetBrains CodeCanvas Alternative

JetBrains CodeCanvas

JetBrains is primarily known for its IDEs (e.g. IntelliJ and PyCharm), which have a feature that allows to run only an IDE thin client locally (i.e. on a developer’s laptop) and connect to an IDE backend that runs somewhere else via ssh. Because of this feature, the JetBrains IDEs are compatible with many CDE products by simply running the IDE backend in the CDE, and the thin client locally. 

JetBrains’ product strategy is not quite clear to me, since it has launched several closely related products with partially overlapping feature sets that compete with products of their partners. First, JetBrains launched their Space product, an “intelligent code collaboration platform”, which has some limited CDE features. Now, its CodeCanvas product, launched in April 2024, is branded as a full CDE product. In the meantime, JetBrains is pursuing partnerships with several CDE vendors who have integrated their products tightly with the JetBrains IDEs. As such, I’m personally unsure if and how their product roadmap will develop and if a CDE product has a fixed place in it.

CodeCanvas is described as a CDE management platform, through which single-container CDEs can be created, started, stopped and deleted. CDEs run in a Kubernetes cluster and are intended to run a JetBrains IDE backend. While it might be possible, it is not an intended use case of CodeCanvas to run the full application within the CDE.

Developers connect to the CDE with JetBrains Gateway, a desktop application that allows users to locally connect to JetBrains IDE backends. CDEs are configured via a custom template that is created in a web UI. It contains reference to a dockerfile which describes the CDE container (a single container).

JetBrains CodeCanvas is best for:

• Organisations that already use JetBrains IDEs and other JetBrains products in their development workflows
• Organisations who do not want to deploy their applications within the CDE
  (which, in my opinion, removes the main benefit of a CDE. Finding a place to
  run an IDE backend is not the challenge that CDEs need to solve.)

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