A major version release within the Eclipse Foundation community always provides us a reason to celebrate, congratulate, and thank all those who participated and contributed to the process. The delivery today of Eclipse Che 7 is no exception. But Che 7’s arrival is more than great news for the Eclipse community, it’s also an industry game changer because it drastically reduces the learning and adoption curves of Kubernetes for enterprise application developers.
Che 7 is the result of more than six years of collaboration and community contributions, including more than 20 vendors. It’s the world’s first Kubernetes-native IDE that has been built from the ground up specifically to enable developers to build cloud native applications. Fundamentally, Che 7 makes the developer and production environments the same on a scalable, collaborative, and secure platform specifically designed for building containerized applications. That platform addresses the major challenges developers face when working with Kubernetes.
While Kubernetes does a fantastic job of operating applications at scale, it’s a complex system that most developers do not yet fully understand. With Che 7, the workspace configuration complexities and challenges developers face with Kubernetes have been eliminated. The platform can be deployed on a public Kubernetes cluster or an on-premises data center. Once deployed, it provides centrally hosted private developer workspaces that make projects easy to share and easy to manage, but with enterprise-grade security.
Che 7 takes care of the “Kubernetization” of the development environment and the applications that a developer is building. It comes with a pre-packaged web-based IDE, based on an extended version of Eclipse Theia to provide an in-browser Visual Studio Code experience. The fully integrated environment containerizes everything a developer needs to develop, build, run, test, and debug enterprise cloud native applications. This includes all of the tools and dependencies. This a big deal considering many enterprises cite a lack of integration of development tools and processes as a primary challenge of container adoption.
The introduction of Che 7 represents another milestone in enterprise-grade, cloud native tooling innovation from the Eclipse Foundation and our community. It continues the Eclipse Foundation track record of delivering innovative tools to the development community, most notably through the Eclipse desktop IDE. Che is already integral to cloud native solutions from our vendor community, including Google, IBM, and Broadcom. It also comprises the core of Red Hat CodeReady Workspaces, a new development environment for Red Hat OpenShift.
As we move forward, our community will continue to deliver more innovation through the Eclipse Cloud Development (ECD) Tools Working Group. In addition to Che, the ECD WG encompasses a broad portfolio of open source cloud development projects including Theia, Eclipse CodeWind, Eclipse Dirigible, Eclipse Sprotty, Eclipse Orion, and many more. The ECD WG will drive the evolution and adoption of de facto standards for cloud development tools, including language support, extensions, and developer workspace definitions.
Of course, Che 7 and the ECD WG are made possible by our development community. So, I thank all of those who have participated to date and encourage everyone to take part in the innovation process. To that end, we are actively recruiting members to the Eclipse Cloud Development Working group and we encourage and welcome new members.
Get started with Che 7 on any Kubernetes cluster at https://www.eclipse.org/che/ or learn more about getting started with Che at https://www.eclipse.org/che/getting-started/. To get involved with the Che community and contribute to the project, visit: https://github.com/eclipse/che/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md
