This article is based on a report originally published by enterprisetech.com on February 5, 2019.
The Problem: Traditional Dev Tools Don’t Speak Kubernetes
As Kubernetes has become the de facto standard for container orchestration in production environments, a gap has widened between how developers write code locally and how that code ultimately runs in production. Traditional development tools were designed before containers and Kubernetes existed, which means developer teams have typically had to manually manage environment configurations, dependencies, and cluster contexts—time spent away from writing actual application logic.
Red Hat addressed this friction directly with the release of CodeReady Workspaces, a browser-based, Kubernetes-native development environment announced on February 5, 2019. The platform is optimized for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and Red Hat OpenShift, and is designed to bring developers into the Kubernetes/OpenShift loop from the very beginning of the development lifecycle—not just at testing and deployment time.
What Is CodeReady Workspaces?
CodeReady Workspaces is a browser-based IDE built on top of the Eclipse Che open source project—an open source workspace server and cloud development environment that Red Hat has contributed to. Rather than running on a developer’s local machine, the workspace itself runs inside an OpenShift cluster, where both source code and dependencies are managed within containers.
This architecture means every member of an enterprise development team shares an identical, reproducible environment. There is no “works on my machine” problem when the machine is a container running on Kubernetes.
Key Features
- Kubernetes-native workspaces: Code, runtimes, and dependencies run inside OpenShift containers on a live Kubernetes cluster, mirroring the production environment from day one.
- Browser-based IDE: No local installation required. Developers access a full development environment through a web browser, reducing onboarding time and configuration drift.
- Shared tooling: Enterprise teams can share tools, plugins, and dependency configurations across the organization, enforcing consistency without manual coordination.
- Factories templates: A “Factories” feature allows teams to define a project template that encodes the source code location, runtime environment, tooling configurations, and build/run commands. Sharing a Factory URL gives a new developer a fully configured workspace instantly.
- OpenShift integration: Because workspaces run on OpenShift, developers can test against the same platform and Kubernetes APIs used in production, reducing the risk of environment-related bugs when promoting applications.
Why Kubernetes-Native Development Matters
Historically, developers have interacted with Kubernetes primarily at the tail end of the development cycle—pushing images to a registry and deploying manifests for testing or production. The configuration of the local development environment was separate from the Kubernetes manifests describing production. This gap is a common source of bugs, slow feedback loops, and environment-specific failures.
By running the development environment itself as workloads on OpenShift, CodeReady Workspaces collapses this gap. Developers can iterate against actual Kubernetes APIs and OpenShift primitives while writing code, catching compatibility issues far earlier in the cycle. Red Hat positions this as enabling developers to ship containerized applications faster, with Kubernetes artifact management handled in the background rather than as a manual overhead task.
As Brad Micklea, Red Hat’s Senior Director for Developer Experience and Programs, stated at the time of release: “The rise of cloud-native applications and Kubernetes as the platform for modern workloads requires a change in how developers approach building, testing and deploying their critical applications.”
Industry Context: Kubernetes Adoption in 2019
The release came at a time of rapid Kubernetes adoption across the enterprise. A survey released in August 2018 by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) reported that 40 percent of polled enterprises were running Kubernetes in production. Nearly half of survey respondents identified as software developers, many of whom were increasing their use of continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) automation tooling.
This growth created demand for developer tooling that could keep pace with cloud-native infrastructure—a gap that products like CodeReady Workspaces were designed to fill.
Availability and Licensing
At launch, Red Hat made CodeReady Workspaces available at no additional cost with an active OpenShift subscription. Developers without a subscription could access it by joining the Red Hat Developer Program. Being based on the open source Eclipse Che project, the underlying technology is also available to the broader community outside of Red Hat’s commercial distribution.
Summary
CodeReady Workspaces represents a meaningful architectural shift in how enterprise development environments can be structured: instead of configuring individual developer machines to approximate a Kubernetes environment, the development environment itself becomes a Kubernetes workload. For teams already operating on OpenShift, this means shared, reproducible, browser-accessible workspaces that are consistent from first commit to production deployment—reducing configuration overhead and tightening the feedback loop for cloud-native application development.