Why CDEs are One of the trends included in Gartner® report, Top 5 Strategic Technology Trends in Software Engineering for 2024

Cloud Development Environments (CDEs) are transforming fast-moving, entrepreneurial organizations. Their use cases are skyrocketing. For those developers and IT teams that are accustomed to on-prem project work and onboarding, the rise in popularity of CDEs have offered an immediate improvement to productivity, task management, and security.

CDEs are growing in popularity, but don’t take our word for it! In August, Gartner included CDEs as a technology to watch in its Hype Cycle™ for Emerging Technologies, and noted in a new report, Top 5 Strategic Technology Trends in Software Engineering for 2024 that by 2027, 40% of organizations in highly regulated verticals will mandate cloud development environments. That’s up from less than 10% in 2024.

In the report, Top 5 Strategic Technology Trends in Software Engineering for 2024, Gartner states that, “investments in disruptive technologies can empower software engineering teams to meet business objectives for productivity, sustainability and growth. This research highlights the top five technology trends that software engineering leaders must track and act on in 2024 and beyond.”

Key Drivers Behind CDE Adoption:

• Software supply chain attacks are on the rise. Local development environments are a security risk. Security teams can centrally manage, govern, and secure cloud development environments to minimize the threat. Cloud development environments also make it easier to support and secure personally owned devices.
• The automation of DevOps workflows introduces more complexity. With the addition of numerous plug-ins, extensions and API integrations, updating and configuring local machines has become cumbersome and unreliable. Cloud development environments seamlessly integrate with Git-based repositories and continuous integration/continuous delivery tools.
• Modern applications require modern development solutions. Mesh services, event-driven apps, and Kubernetes applications are difficult to develop and test on local machines. Cloud development environments provide custom preconfigured hardware to support specific application architectures.

At Coder, we believe the benefits of CDEs are improving developer experience, while also giving developers a secure, productive cloud environment to not only achieve flow state, but giving IT leaders peace of mind for employee onboarding and project management.

For example, Palantir exemplifies this shift—moving coding to the cloud in 2022. Coder ended up giving them the flexibility and leverage they needed to manage complex development setups, control costs, and improve developer experience. The team was able to explore ways to implement an ephemeral remote workplace model to solve a number of complexities in its development processes early on. Building large, complex software products required heavy compute resources, and “configuration drift” was creating more instances where developers shrug and say, “it works on my machine.” Onboarding was a time-consuming process for both new hires and developers moving from project to project.

Organizations can take multiple routes when encountering these issues – from buying more powerful laptops, to shifting development infrastructure to SaaS platforms. However, this is where CDEs can solve a multitude of problems at once and can pay dividends.

CDEs create faster development cycles, sped up download times, reduced need for onboarding and support, and a clear path for more external contributions. Since the workspaces live right next to the code repository and artifact servers, download times and request latency decrease considerably. For Palantir, the dedicated development infrastructure teams debugged fewer issues on local machines, allowing teams to spend more time focused on optimizing developer tooling. Creating an easier path to development environments, teams were also able to easily contribute to each other’s codebases.

The other four trends in the report are well known:

• AI-augmented development promises to boost developer productivity, control costs, and improve their teams’ ability to deliver more value;
• Software engineering intelligence provides visibility into teams’ use of time and resources, operational effectiveness, and progress on business objectives;
• Green software engineering initiatives can advance organizations’ sustainability objectives and reduce the carbon footprint of building digital products;
• And platform engineering projects reduce complexity via scalable, self-service platforms, which will improve developer experience and developer productivity.

Overall, CDEs have arrived. They’re generating tangible benefits for organizations like Palantir Technologies, which was aggressive enough to change their models, and they’re on the short list of agenda items software engineering teams will tackle in 2024.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Gartner, Gartner Press Release, “Gartner Identifies the Top Five Strategic Technology Trends in Software Engineering for 2024” May 16, 2024, https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2024-05-16-gartner-identifies-the-top-five-strategic-technology-trends-in-software-engineering-for-2024 Gartner, Top 5 Strategic Technology Trends in Software Engineering for 2024, Joachim Herschmann, Manjunath Bhat, et al, 15 May 2024 Gartner, Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies, 2023, Arun Chandrasekaran, Melissa Davis, 2 August 2023 GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally, and HYPE CYCLE is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.