The Modern Alternative to VDI: Key Takeaways from our October Webinar

Traditional Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) solutions hinder developer productivity and inflate infrastructure costs. In this webinar, we show a modern alternative to VDI with Coder and Island. Developers can onboard in minutes while organizations can enforce browser-level governance and reduce VDI-related costs by up to 90%.

Our October webinar introduces an alternative to Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) that’s tailored for developers, increasing their productivity while giving the enterprise more flexibility to manage and monitor development environments. Eric Paulsen, our Field CTO for EMEA, and Tim Deese, Sales Engineer at Island, show how to combine Coder with Island to provide a more responsive developer experience, consolidate administrative tasks, and reduce infrastructure costs.

VDI is convenient, but isn’t for developers

With VDI, the user works with familiar desktops while organizations leverage the cloud to host these desktops. But VDI is a generalized solution, not designed for the specific needs of developers:

• Laggy: Degraded developer experience and slower time-to-market.
• Slow for everyday tasks: Mismanaged resources mean that one developer's demands degrade others' experiences.
• Compatibility conflicts: Development tools are designed for Linux, yet VDI typically runs on Windows.
• Too restrictive: VDI policies prevent developers from customizing their own environments.
• Expensive: VDI hosts both the dev environment and the desktop OS. VDI licensing and infrastructure are among the most expensive cloud services.

While VDI was an excellent solution 10 or 15 years ago, today there are more flexible, cost-effective tools for developers. For example, VS Code can run in the browser, taking advantage of the browser’s capabilities for running responsive, full-featured applications. This opens more choices for the enterprise to host the rest of the development environment.

Coder with Island is a flexible VDI alternative

To take advantage of these innovations, an enterprise can combine Coder with Island.

Coder is a CDE platform that provisions, manages, and monitors development environments. It natively supports a wide variety of OSs and runtime platforms. In other words, you choose the most developer-productive, cost-effective way to deliver dev environments.

Island is a web browser designed for the enterprise. For better user experience, it’s optimized to run applications in-browser. For organizations, Island controls security and access management.

Coder with Island gives the enterprise major benefits:

• Spin up pre-configured, ready-to-use dev environments quickly and consistently at the click of a button.
• Manage and monitor development environments from a centralized place.
• Provision infrastructure flexibly and efficiently to respond to both drops and spikes in demand.

Learn more

The original promise of VDI doesn’t match developer expectations or the enterprise’s security requirements and budget. Replacing VDI with Coder with Island improves developer experience, avoids VDI shortcomings, and reduces infrastructure spending.

You can find out more about this alternative to VDI for developers by [registering here].

Join our upcoming webinar: Unlock the Power of Advanced AI with Coder and Amazon Q on November 19, 2024.