Source: InfoQ (original reporting by Charles Humble, published June 2017)
Red Hat Acquires Codenvy to Strengthen Container-Native Developer Tooling
Red Hat announced the acquisition of Codenvy, a cloud-native and agile tools provider, in mid-2017. Financial terms of the deal were not publicly disclosed. The acquisition was not expected to have a material impact on Red Hat’s earnings guidance for its first fiscal quarter ending May 31, 2017, or its fiscal year ending February 28, 2018, and remained subject to standard regulatory approvals.
What Is Codenvy?
Codenvy is a cloud-native collaborative development platform built on top of Eclipse Che, an open source cloud IDE and developer workspace server. Rather than running locally on a developer’s machine, Codenvy workspaces execute inside Linux containers and are accessed entirely through a browser. The platform combines project source code, runtime environments, and the IDE itself into a single, shareable workspace unit.
This architecture eliminates the need for developers to configure and maintain a local development environment. Instead, teams can share pre-configured, reproducible workspaces, reducing onboarding time and environment-related inconsistencies — a persistent source of friction in collaborative software development.
Eclipse Che and the Broader Ecosystem
Codenvy founded the Eclipse Che open source community, which Red Hat had already joined prior to the acquisition. The project had attracted contributions from organisations including Microsoft, SAP, Samsung, Serli, and WSO2 — representing 70 contributors in total, with 39 of them coming from Codenvy itself.
In 2016, Red Hat, Codenvy, and Microsoft collaborated on a common protocol for integrating programming language tooling across editors and cloud IDEs. This work contributed to broader standardisation efforts in developer tooling, enabling language intelligence features such as code completion and error highlighting to be shared across different editing environments.
Strategic Fit: OpenShift.io and Container-First Development
Red Hat planned to integrate Codenvy into OpenShift.io, a hosted development environment for building hybrid cloud services that Red Hat had announced earlier in the same month. The acquisition positioned Eclipse Che as a central pillar of Red Hat’s overall tooling strategy, with plans to extend and integrate cloud-based developer workspaces across Red Hat’s full platform portfolio.
Tyler Jewell, Codenvy’s founder, explained the strategic rationale in an interview with InfoQ’s editor-in-chief, Charles Humble:
Codenvy is a perfect strategic fit for Red Hat on two dimensions; firstly, Red Hat is going all in on containers. The second dimension is that the board and the company decided that developers were going to be a strategic discipline for them.
— Tyler Jewell, Founder, Codenvy
The Developer Productivity Problem in a Container World
Jewell identified a structural tension that emerges as organisations adopt container technology at scale. While containers solve many operational deployment problems, they can introduce new complexity for developers who must understand Linux namespaces, networking, and container runtimes just to run and debug their applications locally. Jewell described this as a shift in dependency management burden:
Containers, while essential, shift application dependency burdens from operations to development. For developers, adopting the container paradigm gates writing and debugging code behind a complex abstraction that requires expert Linux knowledge. This makes developer productivity a huge issue for companies adopting containers.
— Tyler Jewell, Founder, Codenvy
Jewell went on to outline how cloud-native workspaces address this problem by making development infrastructure transparent and managed:
There’s a ‘dirty secret’ that developers spend half their time managing their development infrastructure. The demands on these teams to release more frequently are increasing faster than their ability to manage this infrastructure. The only way these development teams are going to become more productive is if the development infrastructure becomes transparent and is managed for them. The only way you can do that is by having an end-to-end system where all these components are deployed and pre-integrated together based upon what the development team does.
— Tyler Jewell, Founder, Codenvy
Red Hat’s Position on Developer Experience and Digital Transformation
Craig Muzilla, Senior Vice President of Application Platforms Business at Red Hat at the time, framed the acquisition in the context of increasing organisational pressure on software delivery speed:
Thanks to the increasing push towards digital transformation and the use of technology platforms, including apps, as a strategic business advantage, the role of the developer has never been more important. But, accelerated innovation through agile development requires new approaches and tools.
— Craig Muzilla, SVP Application Platforms Business, Red Hat
Company Background
Codenvy was founded in 2013 by Tyler Jewell and had approximately 45 employees distributed across five time zones at the time of the acquisition. The company had raised $10 million in funding from Toba Capital and Auriga Ventures prior to the deal.
Key Takeaways for DevOps Teams
- Cloud IDEs reduce environment drift: Browser-based workspaces built on Eclipse Che give all team members an identical, pre-configured runtime, removing the “works on my machine” problem.
- Container complexity is a developer concern: As container adoption grows, tooling that abstracts infrastructure management directly benefits engineering throughput.
- Open source ecosystem matters: Eclipse Che’s broad contributor base (including Microsoft, SAP, and Samsung) indicated industry-level support for the cloud workspace model, making it a lower-risk long-term bet for Red Hat.
- Platform integration is the goal: Embedding Codenvy into OpenShift.io reflected a trend toward integrated, end-to-end developer platforms rather than point tools requiring manual integration.
The acquisition reflected a broader industry move toward eliminating local development environment overhead as a precondition for contributing to cloud-native applications — a pattern that has continued to gain momentum with tools such as GitHub Codespaces, Gitpod, and the continued evolution of Eclipse Che itself.