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Overview

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Harness CDE is now available in public beta. To enable it on your account, contact your sales representative or reach out to the team at cde-interest@harness.io

Harness CDEs are pre-configured, remote, secure, ready-to-use environments that developers can quickly spin up from anywhere and start writing code, debugging, and collaborating with other developers. Note that while the module name is Harness CDE, Harness-created CDEs are called Gitspaces ™️.

CDEs are designed to eliminate challenges associated with local development environments, such as :

  • Toil of installing/managing a complex set of libraries, tools, dependencies on each developer's machine
  • Environment drift, leading to "works on my machine" bugs
  • Security risk of having intellectual property on every developer's machine

Key features​

  • On-demand: Gitspaces can be launched anytime you want with a single click. If you’re working on multiple projects, or need a fresh environment for any reason, you can get it instantly. Each developer can have multiple Gitspaces if they’re working on multiple tasks that each requires its own custom environment.
  • Pre-configured: Each Gitspace is pre-configured with everything you need to start coding, so you do not have to install or maintain anything on your local machine. No more toil!
  • Standardized, with zero drift: Gitspace configuration lives with your source code in a file named devcontainer.json, which is an industry standard spec that defines metadata and settings required to configure a containerized development environment. Every developer gets the exact same environment, which can be kept consistent with central environments such as CI/CD and production, so you do not have to deal with “works on my machine” bugs. What a relief!
  • Flexible: Each Gitspace can be spun up with custom hardware configuration, so you can get bigger machines for resource intensive applications, and smaller machines for trivial ones. You can even upgrade your machine specs for an existing Gitspace, giving you ultimate flexibility!

Advantages of CDEs​

For organizations who adopt CDE’s, all these characteristics lead to the following developer outcomes:

  • Faster Onboarding: Developers can start coding on day 1 with a single click! This is not just for new developers joining an organization, but also for those switching teams or projects internally. Contractors and remote developers can be onboarded in hours instead of days!
  • Higher developer productivity & satisfaction: CDEs eliminate toil! Developers no longer spend time on frustrating and thankless tasks such as trying to reproduce environment specific issues or reconfiguring their local machines. They can get bigger machines for those resource intensive applications on-demand.
  • Enhanced security for intellectual property: All source code and other sensitive information stays in the cloud and not on developer machines. You can easily set governance and security policies and enforce best practices, making your proprietary information more secure and less vulnerable to malicious attacks.

Eliminating toil, minimizing friction, and avoiding IP leaks leads to happier and more productive developers!