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Tag: Cloud IDE

CodePen 2.0 Turns a Design Playground Into a Real Deployment Tool

CodePen has spent 14 years as the place where front-end developers show off CSS tricks and JavaScript experiments. That reputation is about to change. The company just shipped CodePen 2.0, a full rebuild that turns individual “Pens” into deployable, file-based, version-controlled projects. For a platform best known for demos, that’s a meaningful shift toward production use.

One Editor to Replace Three

Until now, CodePen ran three separate editors: the Classic Pen editor, a Projects editor, and a Vue-specific editor. CodePen 2.0 merges all three into a single tool, and co-founder Chris Coyier says it was built to do everything the old editors could do, plus a long list of new capabilities. The company also says it kept backward compatibility with existing Classic Pens as a priority during the rebuild.

The most notable addition is one-click deployment. Every Pen built in 2.0 can now be pushed to a live *.codepen.app subdomain, updated on save, or pointed at a custom domain. That moves CodePen from a code-sharing tool into something closer to a lightweight hosting platform. It’s a small website builder wrapped around a code editor developers already trust.

File Systems, Versioning, and Real Collaboration

The rest of the release reads like a checklist pulled straight from a standard IDE. Every Pen now has a true file system, so a project can grow from a single HTML file into a multi-page site without switching tools. Pens also get version history, so a bad edit doesn’t mean starting over. And any Pen can now be shared with an editor or viewer by username or email, with real-time co-editing when both people are online at once.

None of these features are new to software development. What’s notable is that CodePen is bringing them to a tool that millions of developers already use for quick prototyping. The company also rebuilt its compiler, called Blocks, which lets developers stack multiple processors (Sass, TypeScript, Tailwind, Vue via Vite, and more) without manually configuring how they connect.

Why This Matters Beyond Front-End Demos

CodePen’s move fits a trend that’s been building across the industry for a couple of years. Research firm Gartner has projected that by 2026, 60% of cloud workloads will be built and deployed using browser-based IDEs, as teams move away from local setups that require constant configuration and maintenance. Tools like GitHub Codespaces, Gitpod, and StackBlitz have already made the case that a browser tab can replace a local dev environment for a growing share of daily work.

“One-click deploy changes what a Pen is,” said Mitch Ashley, VP and practice lead for software lifecycle engineering and AI-native software engineering at The Futurum Group. “A throwaway demo now runs on a live domain, with a real file system and version history behind it. Front-end developers get from idea to working URL without touching a build pipeline.”

That convenience comes with a catch, Ashley said. “It also creates production surface area nobody planned to own. Deployment without ownership is how shadow infrastructure starts. Platform teams need to decide now which of these sites get monitored, secured, and retired.”

CodePen 2.0 isn’t positioning itself as an enterprise cloud IDE competitor. But the underlying bet is the same one those platforms are making: reduce setup friction, keep environments consistent across a team, and let deployment happen without leaving the editor. For DevOps teams already standardizing on cloud-based development environments, CodePen’s shift adds another data point showing where the tooling market is headed, and another reminder that easy deployment needs a governance plan behind it.

What’s Missing, For Now

Coyier addressed one obvious gap directly: there’s no built-in AI in CodePen 2.0. The company says it sees plenty of AI-generated code already showing up on the platform, usually pasted in from elsewhere, but it hasn’t added native AI features yet. Given how central AI coding assistants have become to tools like Codespaces and Cursor, that’s a notable omission, and one CodePen says it’s approaching carefully rather than rushing.

The Classic Editor also isn’t going away immediately. It’s still accessible, just no longer the default path, and CodePen says a full migration of old Pens to 2.0 could happen someday, but not soon.

For developers who’ve used CodePen for quick CSS experiments and portfolio pieces, 2.0 offers a reason to treat it as a more serious part of the workflow. Whether it can compete with dedicated cloud IDEs for real production work remains to be seen, but the direction is clear: CodePen wants to be more than a place to show off code.

July 27, 2026
Best of 2022: Environments-as-a-Service: Free Your Devs

As we close out 2022, we at devopsy.kinsta.cloud wanted to highlight the most popular articles of the year. Following is the latest in our series of the Best of 2022.

Environments are the bane of a DevOps engineer’s existence and have been since the invention of the server. They can create giant bottlenecks that hamper productivity and suck the life and motivation out of developers. But they’re also completely necessary.

DevOps teams spend a ton of time building and maintaining their development environments. They are critical to testing new websites, apps, products and updates; making sure everything works the way it is supposed to. And not having enough environments can slow down workflows as developers wait their turn to use an environment.

There is a new push in the software industry to provide environments-as-a-service (EaaS), removing the annoying yet necessary work of building and maintaining environments and giving DevOps engineers more freedom to tackle more challenging, revenue-generating projects.

EaaS enables companies to use a third-party service to create a new development environment on-demand, including data, infrastructure and code—all the things necessary to build and run an app. Environments-as-a-service bring major improvements to businesses, saving money and time while increasing the velocity, delivery and deployment speed.

EaaS offers automation and codification of all the things that would otherwise waste DevOps and infrastructure folks’ time. They should be focused on higher-value tasks, like creating and refining what makes the company or product unique.

Removing Bottlenecks

When prepping for a new product or service, teams have to test all associated code to make sure it is functional, secure and that there are no hiccups. Multiple environments are crucial to this process. However, in many cases, teams work within a single, shared staging environment.

This setup means developers have to wait in line to test their part of the product. These bottlenecks are among the biggest causes of delayed releases.

Time is money, and in this case, lost time costs money. We estimated the total cost of managing environments exceeded $45 billion annually, and release delays cost organizations millions of dollars every year.

Organizations can layer EaaS on top of their infrastructure-as-code (IaC) frameworks, agile workflows and other important software. By doing this, developers can create a new environment with a single click.

That means developers can make a new environment for every feature branch pull request. EaaS also unlocks customization capabilities, as well. For example, testing requires larger and faster environments that integrate with other key services, while more scaled-down environments work well for processes like demos.

Now, developers are free to test and develop software, without waiting or stepping on anyone else’s toes. Plus, on-demand environments can also be destroyed when they are no longer needed. That’s capacity planning in real-time.

Save Time and Money

Capacity knowledge and better capacity planning mean money saved. Knowing how many environments are needed, and what types, helps organizations avoid over- or under-spending on cloud infrastructure.

Building out environments can take more than a year for even sizable DevOps teams and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, not to mention the challenges of ongoing management, integration of new tech and management of cloud resources and costs. A third-party EaaS provider takes care of all of that, freeing DevOps engineers to work on hard problems, rather than maintenance and repeating work that has already been done as technology advances.

Is Your Organization EaaS Ready?

Any time a company automates something as important as staging and testing environments, though, it’s important to have all their ducks in a row. Luckily, the best ways to do that match up pretty well with best practices for building out any infrastructure platform:

● Using infrastructure-as-code automates the provisioning of infrastructure instead of doing it manually.

● Containerizing custom code makes it easier to quickly reproduce it for new environments.

● Finally, carefully think about how your environments will behave when they are created dynamically. Simple things like creating environment variables for hostnames and trying not to hardcode variables that are environment-specific are a must.

Organizations that have followed these steps are EaaS-ready. By automating these painstaking tasks, companies can unleash their DevOps teams to be superheroes for the organization, solving the biggest problems and letting tech take care of the rest.

December 23, 2022
Gitpod Looks to Drive Application Development Into the Cloud

Gitpod today revealed it will add an application programming interface (API) to make cloud development environments (CDEs) more extensible. Gitpod also said Johannes Landgraf assumed the role of single CEO for Gitpod, as the previous co-CEO, Sven Efftinge, becomes the company’s first technical fellow.

Fresh from raising an additional $25 million in funding, Gitpod’s Landgraf said that API will make it easier to build plug-ins for CDEs. In time, Landgraf said, CDEs will become as accessible as any development environment running on a local desktop.

Software engineers typically waste five hours a week maintaining application environments, noted Landgraf. Via an open source development platform, Gitpod automates the provisioning of secure workspaces in the cloud that provide the added benefit of making it easier for multiple developers to collaborate, he added.

Capabilities added to the GitPod product roadmap include dramatically faster startup times, improved resiliency and a Gitpod Cloud offering for larger companies as well as a preview environment and workflows that foster collaboration. Gitpod also announced it passed a SOC2 Type II security audit.

Today, the Gitpod platform is being used by more than 750,000 developers at organizations such as Shopify, Stripe and Slack, noted Landgraf.

One of the longstanding issues that has always been problematic when building software is that code that runs on a local desktop doesn’t always work when deployed in a production environment. The Gitpod API will make it simpler to spin up various platforms and tools whenever a developer accesses a CDE. The goal is to make it possible to more closely replicate the production environments on which developers will ultimately deploy their applications, noted Landgraf.

In addition, a CDE should reduce the amount of data that developers routinely move between laptops and cloud computing environments as they build more complex applications, he added.

In the wake of the economic downturn, there is a lot more focus on developer productivity these days, especially as organizations look to accelerate their of digital business transformations. DevOps teams are also keen to find ways to centrally manage developer experience at a time when many of those developers continue to work from home, said Landgraf.

It’s not clear to what degree CDE will replace integrated development environments (IDEs) running on a local machine, but all the major cloud service providers are encouraging developers to build applications in the cloud where their applications will run. The challenge is that many of those offerings tend to lock developers into a specific cloud platform, noted Landgraf. Most developers today are building applications that need to be deployed across multiple clouds, he added.

One way or another, software development is increasingly shifting to the cloud. Most organizations will likely try to find a balance between the amount of code developed on a local machine that developers can just fire up when the mood strikes and the amount of code developed in the cloud. The most immediate challenge is to make sure the CDE experience is every bit as good as the existing local IDE.

November 3, 2022
Open Source Coder Tool Helps Devs Build Cloud Spaces

Coder today launched an open source project that gives developers and data scientists a way to create cloud workspaces in a matter of minutes to make it easier to build applications and models faster.

Currently, Coder provides a cloud application development platform that enables developers to build applications using any editor or integrated development environment (IDE) as an alternative to their local desktop. That capability is made possible by using the open source Terraform infrastructure provisioning tool to spin up a developer workspace. That approach provides developers with access to cloud resources that scale up and down as required versus, for example, being limited to the memory and storage resources that they can access on a laptop or desktop system.

Ketan Gangatirkar, vice president of engineering for Coder, said that while individual cloud service providers offer ways of achieving that goal, those offerings lock organizations into a specific cloud service. The Coder approach allows developers to use their preferred tool across multiple cloud services, he added.

Most developers are already building applications that run on multiple cloud platforms. As such, they require access to a set of tools that eliminate the overhead created when developers need to deploy and master a diverse range of tools to build those applications, said Gangatirkar.

In contrast, with the Coder tool, developers can open a web browser, choose a workspace template and then start coding, he noted. That capability eliminates all the manual, error-prone processes typically required to get a developer workspace set up, said Gangatirkar.

That approach also provides organizations with a more secure means of building applications compared to the time and effort that would otherwise be required to secure every local system used by a development team, he added.

In general, there’s a lot more focus on developer productivity as organizations increase the number of applications they are simultaneously building and deploying. Hiring and retaining developers remains a major challenge as competition for talent intensifies in the race to accelerate digital transformation efforts. All things considered, many developers will prefer to work for organizations that allow them to use the tools they already know and prefer. That approach also makes it easier to onboard developers to a development project, noted Gangatirkar.

It’s not clear how many application development initiatives are never begun simply because it takes too much time and effort to spin up a development environment whenever inspiration strikes. However, it’s clear that developers are wasting a lot of time maintaining multiple local development environments. Much of that time could be better spent writing actual application code.

One way or another, open source tools—such as the one provided by Coder—should remove a lot of the friction that exists in application development today. The only issue that remains is whether those tools will be adopted by developers themselves versus the DevOps teams dedicated to serving them.

June 20, 2022
TypeFox Ties Cloud-Based IDE to GitHub

TypeFox has launched a GitPod.io service that melds the integrated development environment (IDE) based in the cloud from TypeFox with the open source GitHub repository.

Sven Efftinge, co-founder of TypeFox, said this level of integration will make it easier for developers to navigate multiple projects from which they pull code from GitHub into an Eclipse-based IDE.

In addition, when developers open a Gitpod.io workspace, they will find that any build involving an update to an artifact housed in GitHub will have been automatically completed, said Efftinge. That will reduce substantially the amount of time developers spend waiting for build to finish, he noted.

TypeFox collaborated with Google, Ericsson, Arm and Red Hat to develop the open source Eclipse Theia project, which provides a foundation for building IDEs in the cloud using TypeScript, CSS and HTML for a desktop-like user experience. At the highest level, Theia consists of a front end running in a browser or in the local desktop application and a back end running on any host or locally within the desktop application. Both the front end and back end communicate through JSON RPC over WebSockets. TypeFox then leveraged that project to build its own cloud-based IDE.

Gitpod.io further advances the collaboration capabilities that are inherent of cloud-based IDE by adding the ability to capture and share snapshots of the development environment.

Efftinge said following initial support for GitLab, the next effort will be focused on integrating Gitpod.io with the GitLab repository, which is used widely in traditional enterprise IT organizations.

Regardless of the repository employed, more attention needs to be paid to reducing the daily friction developers encounter when developing applications. While best DevOps practices go a long way to accelerating application development and deployment, there a lot of wasted steps during the development process that, if eliminated, would increase developer productivity substantially. Of course, the more productive developers become, the more applications there are moving through the continuous integration/continuous development (CI/CD) pipeline.

It’s still a bit unclear to what degree application development will move to the cloud. It’s certainly easier to streamline development process in the cloud. But many developers remain attached to individual workstations because they may not always be in a location that has reliable access to the internet. However, as application development—especially in the age of microservices—becomes more of a team sport, it’s clear that more application development is being pushed into the cloud. Pushing application development into the cloud also provides the benefit of reducing the number of high-end PCs and workstations an organization may need to acquire for its developers.

Whatever the path chosen, it’s clear repositories such as GitHub and GitLab are now at the center of application development. Very few developers these days are writing raw code. Most of them are combining artifacts stored in repository to build their applications. The challenge organizations now face is bringing some consistency to what otherwise could easily become a chaotic process.

— Mike Vizard

April 9, 2019
The Cloud IDE and it’s impact on DevOps

Recently I did an interview with IBMs Ken Walker. Co-lead on the Eclipse Orion Project, a cloud-based integrated development environment (IDE). My interest in Cloud IDEs peaked at the beginning of the year and has been steadily growing since the interview and being an active user of Cloud9 ( My current favorite Cloud IDE). During this time I realized the Cloud IDE has the ability to totally transform teams. We all know where the IDE belongs in the developers life, but what, if any, is the Cloud IDEs impact on the DevOps movement?

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May 8, 2014