DEVOPSdigest

Red Hat announced the release of Red Hat CodeReady Workspaces 2, a cloud-native development workflow for developers.

The new release of CodeReady Workspaces enables developers to create and build applications and services in an environment that mirrors that of production, all running on Red Hat OpenShift, the industry's most comprehensive enterprise Kubernetes platform.

Today’s organizations can use Kubernetes to create and deploy their applications and services, but for developers, Kubernetes adds new challenges to an already complex development workflow. With CodeReady Workspaces, development teams can collaborate more efficiently by centralizing development environment configuration and working in replicable OpenShift containers for development work.

CodeReady Workspaces 2 builds on the features developers loved in the first release — the powerful in-browser integrated development environment (IDE), centralized one-click developer workspaces, Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP), Active Directory (AD), OpenAuth support and more — along with several new tools and services, including:

- Air-gapped installs, which enable CodeReady Workspaces to be downloaded, scanned and moved into more secure environments when access to the public internet is limited or unavailable. It doesn’t "call back" to public internet services.

- An updated user interface, bringing an improved desktop-like experience to developers.

- Support for VSCode extensions, giving developers access to thousands of IDE extensions.

- Devfile, a sharable workspace configuration that specifies everything a developer needs to work, including repositories, runtimes, build tools and IDE plugins, and is stored and versioned with the code in Git.

- Production consistent containers for developers, which clones the sources in where needed and adds development tools (such as debuggers, language servers, unit test tools, build tools) as sidecar containers so that the running application container mirrors production.

CodeReady Workspaces enables development teams to set up and work in Kubernetes by hosting configurations that define source code, build environment runtimes, and development tools. With the in-browser IDE, source code remains centrally hosted improving security without sacrificing the speed you need to stay productive. An administrative dashboard means administrators supporting developer teams have centralized management tools and dashboards to monitor CodeReady Workspaces and developer workspace performance.

As part of the Red Hat portfolio, CodeReady Workspaces is supported by Red Hat’s award-winning enterprise support for developer workspace tooling.

CodeReady Workspaces is included in Red Hat OpenShift and will be available in the OpenShift OperatorHub in the coming weeks.

Brad Micklea, VP of Developer Tools, Developer Programs, and Advocacy, Red Hat, said: "As more organizations are adopting Kubernetes, Red Hat is working to make developing in cloud native environments easier offering the features developers need without requiring deep container knowledge. Red Hat CodeReady Workspaces 2 is well-suited for security-sensitive environments and those organizations that work with consultants and offshore development teams."