The first ever Cloud IDE Day was held on May 19th, 2021 as a virtual event. While we do have our ongoing Cloud Tool Time webinars and Cloud Chat Twitch.tv series, for the Eclipse Cloud DevTools Working Group, Cloud IDE Day was our first attempt at organizing a larger scale event. With over 200 registrants, nearly 150 live attendees and an impressive group of speakers that delivered some fantastic sessions, you can expect to see more of these kinds of events in the future. Be sure to watch this space, join our mailing list and/or follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn!
This inaugural Cloud IDE Day event was created specifically for IDE developers, with an emphasis on tools and best practices for development in the Cloud. It is an extension of the IDE Summit that debuted in October 2020 and aims to guide the future direction of IDE technology.
The program consisted of 5 sessions, over the course of roughly 4 hours.
In the first session Kyle Carberry, the CTO & Co-founder of Coder, discussed how ‘The Future of Cloud Development is Editor Neutral’. He shared Coder’s experience and challenges trying to build their own Cloud IDE, and what ultimately pushed them in a different direction.
In session two, Serhii Leshchenko and Elson Yuen, both principal software engineers at RedHat, shared details of work they are involved in with the configuration and setup of cloud development environments. Their talk, ‘Simplifying and Standardizing Developer Environments for the Cloud’, discusses the critical need for the industry to come together to create standards so developers can spend more time coding and less time setting up.
Philip Langer of EclipseSource was up next in session three with ‘Web-based Diagram Editors with GLSP’. Eclipse GLSP (Graphical Language Server Platform) is a Cloud DevTools project to apply the architectural pattern of LSP to graphical modeling. It’s a prime example of how domain-specific tools have arrived in the cloud, and Philip talked through the challenges, the architecture, the relationship with Eclipse Sprotty, and the tool platform integrations of GLSP.
‘Achieving Economies of Scale in Cloud IDEs’ was the topic of our fourth session by Thomas Mäder of RedHat who works on Eclipse Che and Eclipse Theia. He talked about the compute costs of indexing code in the cloud, as well as the most common tasks that happen in a developer environment. While economies of scale could arise from pre-computing and sharing data, ultimately tool architectures need to change to realize significant savings.
Last up was our panel discussion moderated by Jesse Williams of AWS and consisting of 4 great panelists with tons of experience in building IDEs and developer products:
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Marc Dumais (Ericsson)
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Jessielaine Punongbayan (Broadcom)
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Ammar Bandukwala (Coder)
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Sven Efftinge (Gitpod)
Panelists shared their experiences, both in terms of what went well and also the challenges. The solutions discussed are varied, and their customers range from hobby developers to those working in an enterprise environment, and everything in between.
We hope you will enjoy watching (or re-watching) these great sessions. A huge thank you to Ben Potter of Coder for helping us with the recordings!
We welcome your feedback, you can find out how to participate further on our community page. We look forward to organizing more great community events to help define and drive the future of cloud development.
