Google uses Cider internally. Cider is a custom browser code editor which mounts the enormous Piper file system and provides a super tight integration with internal review, build and testing tools.

Github recently announced Github Codespaces to jump directly into a working environment when looking at a repository. Gitlab recently announced their partnership with Gitpod, building their own opensource clone of VSCode, providing the same functionality as Codespaces since some time already.

But why all this? Simply put, desktop IDE’s do not scale up!
In times of microservices and cloud developers just have to work on more complex projects… faster 🤓

While it is clear for Google that a single desktop, no matter how powerful, can not handle the Google Dev environment alone, it becomes almost equally important for smaller companies to not spend months on setting up a development environment.

The next logical step?

Move the full development infrastructure (from dev to production) to the cloud and unlock the potential of tools that exceed the abilities of my desktop.

This is why we built Codesphere 🚀