Cloud Desktops: Your New DevOps Ally
January 26, 2021

Brad Petersen
Workspot

DevOps adoption is growing steadily as more organizations take advantage of these practices to empower IT teams to deliver applications and services at high velocity. Bringing together software development and IT operations is helping shorten the systems development lifecycle and provide continuous delivery.

At the same time, organizations are finding themselves with a whole new set of challenges, including hiring and collaboration, especially as skill and talent shortages increase. The cloud, and specifically cloud desktops, can address many of these challenges and help organizations get the most bang for the buck when it comes to their DevOps teams. In fact, the two technologies have a symbiotic relationship.

Navigating DevOps Challenges

Finding the right developers is a big challenge these days; there is a shortage of people with key skills. In fact, a recent report by the Linux Foundation and edX finds organizations are searching for more people with open source DevOps skills (65%) than developers (59%) for the first time.

Hiring remotely is one option but it also comes with complications. Hiring people in another country, for instance, will likely entail a visa process that can take several months to complete. And collaboration can be difficult among people in geographically separated offices or with external project partners, creating project bottlenecks that inhibit productivity.

Onboarding is tedious and time-consuming, too. Once the new hire process is complete, the onboarding process begins. Getting new hires settled in a workflow and procuring and shipping the laptops or workstations they need takes at least a couple more weeks before they can become productive. But organizations want to be able to hire developers anywhere they can find the right people and then have them productive within hours, not weeks or months.

Collaboration is a Particular Pain Point

Collaboration is essential for DevOps teams, but as mentioned above, it's not always easy — especially when those teams are geographically dispersed. Developer teams have attempted to solve this problem by adopting a variety of technologies such as legacy VDI solutions, VPNs for remote work, physical workstations connected over a WAN, and others. These technologies have helped with some of the problems, but they've also introduced a host of issues that negatively affect productivity and increase cost and complexity. That includes lack of performance, unreliable user experience, IP security concerns and data management problems.

Cloud Desktops Enable DevOps Teams

What's needed is a new approach. Cloud desktops offer many advantages when it comes to addressing some of the key challenges DevOps teams face. For one thing, they make onboarding much easier. By using cloud desktops and workstations, all that the new, talented software developer needs is a device and an internet connection, and they instantly become a part of the development team. This solves another headache that consumes unnecessary IT resources.

Additionally, cloud desktops solve the challenges of shipping and hardware preference. No more shipping, no more maintenance overhead, no more Windows v. Mac debates. Now, developers can pick the device they want, depending on their role requirements. They can even use smartphones and tablets in docking stations instead of laptops.

Better Tools and Improved Collaboration

Cloud desktops are ideal for DevOps teams because they support multiple desktop images. For developers, this means that they can have multiple desktops, all with differing versions, and all kept separate. This is great news if you don't want to have to keep reimaging a physical device.

One option that cloud desktops enable is giving a developer a persistent desktop. Another option is the ability to give the developer a brand new, "clean" cloud desktop every day. For enterprises, this means they can control the developers' IDE so code leaks from one release to the next don't happen, intellectual property is better protected, and they have stronger overall data security.

Testers benefit as well, as they know they'll have a totally clean, brand-new cloud desktop every day. This allows them to test and test again in isolation, knowing nothing was left behind from a previous test. In addition, the right cloud desktop enables anytime, anyplace collaboration; geographical limits become a thing of the past.

Your DevOps Ally

DevOps is here to stay, but it's not a silver bullet. Though it's a model that in theory creates faster delivery times, finding skilled employees is difficult, and so is provisioning them. Organizations need to be able to hire as far afield as necessary to find qualified talent and to get those new workers productive as quickly as possible. Cloud desktops meet both of these needs, as well as offering other benefits. time-to-productivity increases significantly, and the user experience is a great improvement over legacy VDI solutions, even for the most demanding GPU users. Consider the difference cloud desktops could make in the lives of your DevOps team.

Brad Peterson is VP of Marketing at Workspot
Share this

Industry News

May 21, 2025

Red Hat announced jointly-engineered, integrated and supported images for Red Hat Enterprise Linux across Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure.

May 21, 2025

Komodor announced the integration of the Komodor platform with Internal Developer Portals (IDPs), starting with built-in support for Backstage and Port.

May 21, 2025

Operant AI announced Woodpecker, an open-source, automated red teaming engine, that will make advanced security testing accessible to organizations of all sizes.

May 21, 2025

As part of Summer '25 Edition, Shopify is rolling out new tools and features designed specifically for developers.

May 21, 2025

Lenses.io announced the release of a suite of AI agents that can radically improve developer productivity.

May 20, 2025

Google unveiled a significant wave of advancements designed to supercharge how developers build and scale AI applications – from early-stage experimentation right through to large-scale deployment.

May 20, 2025

Red Hat announced Red Hat Advanced Developer Suite, a new addition to Red Hat OpenShift, the hybrid cloud application platform powered by Kubernetes, designed to improve developer productivity and application security with enhancements to speed the adoption of Red Hat AI technologies.

May 20, 2025

Perforce Software announced Perforce Intelligence, a blueprint to embed AI across its product lines and connect its AI with platforms and tools across the DevOps lifecycle.

May 20, 2025

CloudBees announced CloudBees Unify, a strategic leap forward in how enterprises manage software delivery at scale, shifting from offering standalone DevOps tools to delivering a comprehensive, modular solution for today’s most complex, hybrid software environments.

May 20, 2025

Azul and JetBrains announced a strategic technical collaboration to enhance the runtime performance and scalability of web and server-side Kotlin applications.

May 19, 2025

Docker, Inc.® announced Docker Hardened Images (DHI), a curated catalog of security-hardened, enterprise-grade container images designed to meet today’s toughest software supply chain challenges.

May 19, 2025

GitHub announced that GitHub Copilot now includes an asynchronous coding agent, embedded directly in GitHub and accessible from VS Code—creating a powerful Agentic DevOps loop across coding environments.

May 19, 2025

Red Hat announced its integration with the newly announced NVIDIA Enterprise AI Factory validated design, helping to power a new wave of agentic AI innovation.

May 19, 2025

JFrog announced the integration of its foundational DevSecOps tools with the NVIDIA Enterprise AI Factory validated design.

May 15, 2025

GitLab announced the launch of GitLab 18, including AI capabilities natively integrated into the platform and major new innovations across core DevOps, and security and compliance workflows that are available now, with further enhancements planned throughout the year.