Gitpod, the first open-source developer platform to automate the provisioning of ready-to-code development environment has announced a $3 million seed funding from Crane Venture Partners, Speedinvest, and Vertex Ventures US, as well as a partnership and native integration with GitLab, the DevOps platform delivered as a single application.

Gitpod is an open-source GitOps solution that leverages the version control system as the canonical source of truth to automate everything a developer needs to start coding. Through automation. Gitpod frees engineering teams from the friction of manually setting-up local dev environments, Gitpod is open-source and can be self-hosted as well be used for automatically spinning up ready-to-code development environments with code-hosting platforms.

“This is an exciting time in Gitpod’s history teaming up with experienced investors in the world of developer tools and open-source software as well as working together with GitLab to provide developers with critical cloud-based dev environment automation. Gitpod’s first-mover advantage and vibrant open-source community enable developers today to treat development environments as automated (yet customisable) resources, which they can spin up whenever they need them and close down and forget about when they are finished with their task,” said Sven Efftinge, Co-Founder and CEO of Gitpod.

The native integration allows developers on GitLab to automatically spin up ready-to-code development environments via Gitpod’s open-source platform.

“Gitpod’s team has a track record of creating multiple open-source developer tools used by millions of engineers. With software engineering moving to remote but collaborative work, we see Gitpod securely allowing multiplayer mode for developers while saving VPs of Engineering hundreds of hours of tool setup-time. This will be an integral part of any professional software delivery pipeline.” said Sandeep Bhadra, Partner at Vertex Ventures US.

How Could This Be Helpful For Developers?

With GitOps, there is automation embedded in continuous delivery pipelines in software development. With automation, whenever you make changes into your Git, there is a continuous integration build and infrastructure as code in order to deploy the different environments. Once the software is running, developers automatically deploy to production.

But despite this automation, there is one piece where engineers start being creative, and modify the software with coding and debugging to try to you know to hunt down bugs or add innovative new features. The issue is that even today there still is so much friction and manual steps. Here, developers pull down the source code on their powerful machine locally and install numerous plugins in their IDEs in order to get productive.

Gitpod wants to give developers a development environment, and without much complexity and manual work, software dev environments should be automated. So, when developers want to code in an enterprise setting, they should just click a button and be able to code no matter what device they have. So in terms of dev environments, you have tools like the SDKs, compilers, runtimes, application server, database, etc. Also, there are other tools for running tests and so on.

Setting up and maintaining dev environments is tedious and requires lots of time. With Gitpod’s integration into GitLab, code reviews, bug fixes, building new features and exploring new projects is frictionless while increasing development productivity, efficiency and velocity. Developers can easily launch fresh dev environments for each new task directly from the GitLab interface via a new dropdown option from any project or merge request.

Gitpod is a true open-source solution powered by the community, spins up magically fast, can be self-hosted and is the only solution which works with almost any cloud provider and code-hosting platform including GitLab, GitHub Enterprise, and Bitbucket.

“GitLab is excited to build a partnership with Gitpod,” said Brandon Jung, vice president of alliances at GitLab. “Gitpod’s expertise in automating cloud-based dev environments on GitLab combined with their focus on cloud-native development workflows makes them a great fit for our customers helping enable them on their digital transformations.”

The Gitpod platform treats a version control system as the canonical source of truth from which it then automates everything a developer needs to start coding, including the integrated development environment (IDE), plugins, compilers, build tools, code generators, databases and application servers.

Fresh off raising an additional $3 million in funding, Gitpod CEO Sven Efftinge said instead of wasting a half an hour or more waiting for a bunch of libraries and tools to get installed, a developer can click a button that allows them to begin coding within a few minutes.

With the next release of GitLab, developers will also be able to connect their self-managed installation of GitLab to gitpod.io, which is a capability through which multiple git repositories can be registered. In addition, it’s possible to self-host Gitpod on a Kubernetes cluster in a way that integrates with GitLab or install the GitLab VS Code Extension in Gitpod to interact with GitLab.

Efftinge said Gitpod provides DevOps teams with a tool to automate the setting up of development environments across any Git repository that is equivalent to the Codespaces tool that GitHub recently made available. Rather than having that capability for only one repository, Efftinge noted most developers work on projects spanning multiple types of repositories.

By automating that process of setting up development environments it also become easier to align them with production environments. One of the reasons why code doesn’t work in a production environment when it is first deployed is because the local development environment has been manually configured in a way that doesn’t accurately reflect the production environment. That issue becomes even more problematic when developers are working on multiple projects involving, for example, separate microservices constructed using different repositories that might not even run in the same production environment. Collaboration also becomes easier when the members of the teams have standardized on the same instance of a local desktop environment.

Gitpod, formerly TypeFox, collaborated with Google, Ericsson, Arm and Red Hat to develop the open source Eclipse Theia project, which provides a foundation for building IDEs in the cloud using TypeScript, CSS and HTML. Theia, now being advanced under the auspices of the Eclipse Foundation, consists of a front end running in a browser or in the local desktop application and a back end running on any host. Both communicate through JSON RPC over WebSockets. Gitpod leveraged that project to build its own cloud-based service in addition to the core open source project.

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, there’s naturally a lot more focus on automation and developer productivity. Most developers will be working from home for the foreseeable future to help combat the spread of the virus. Of course, most developers have been writing code outside the office for years. The challenge now is enabling teams of developers to develop applications as efficiently as possible regardless of where they are located. Eliminating inefficient manual tasks such as maintaining development environments is emerging as a significant step in that direction.