Q&A – Remote IDE

Our goal is clear – to develop safe functions. But on the way there, the development environment must also fit. Therefore, here is a short question and answer session about our remote IDE.

Q: What is VAIVA’s Remote IDE?

A: The Remote IDE is a platform that provides virtual machines on the cloud for our developers to be used as their primary development environment. To turn these machines into IDE’s, we bundle them with a server-side installation of VSCode and provide project specific tool-chains. Tool-chain configurations are stored within the project’s git repository, so any modifications will propagate automatically to every developer. Access to these remote IDEs only requires a web-browser that will connect to the remote VSCode installation. Every project can manage their own set of tools and developers can focus on their work.

Q: Why did we set it up and what are the key benefits?

A: We wanted to create a unified development environment that focuses on highly enabled developers. It eliminates most if not all problems that come with setting up multiple complex tool-chains on a single physical machine while also respecting necessary security requirements. The remote IDE is deeply integrated into our GitLab DevOps framework and requires no further configuration. We have reduced project on-boarding time down to 3-4 minutes, where it could have easily been several days or weeks.

Q: How do we plan to further develop our Remote IDE?

A: In the future we want increase configurability regarding available resources, like CPU cores, memory etc. but we also want to include a browser based connection to graphical desktops. This would give us the ability to debug our applications live, when these require a grahpical user interface. We also want to offer our system to other companies as a SaaS product in the future.