Coder recently announced its availability on the AWS Marketplace, the latest in a series of product announcements. The company has championed its mission of easing the onboarding difficulties of developers and enabling individuals and small teams through its solutions.
Channel Insider spoke with Coder’s Chief Product Officer, Eric Ledyard, to learn more about his views on AI’s influence on the industry and where Coder is headed next.
Coder’s history of supporting developers fuels next generation of CDE capabilities
Coder was founded in 2017 and has since grown through several rounds of funding and product additions. The vendor has long offered cloud development environments (CDEs) to simplify the time and resourcing needed to onboard a developer into an organization. The company’s platform is available in an open-source model, encouraging a sense of community amongst its user base for years.
The technology solves pain points for businesses that historically could take months to configure a developer’s environment. Coder says developers using its CDEs can contribute code on day one at an organization. Plus, the company’s platform capabilities protect organizations from improper infrastructure usage, saving money on costly resources if and when they aren’t needed.
“Average users are just easier to onboard than developer roles, for many reasons,” Ledyard said. “Writing code also takes a lot of horsepower and performance, so we want to provide something elastic and scalable.”
How the AI boom will impact work, opportunity, and accessibility
Ledyard hears the concerns of many who feel new AI-fueled capabilities will render developers obsolete within the next few years. Still, he approaches the new technology as an opportunity to open development skills to a broader audience.
“Some of the smartest visionaries see AI as a way to make dev work more accessible. You used to need to get technical degrees from top skills and have experience in all sorts of languages, and that’s been changed with the tools now available to automate coding,” Ledyard said.
That said, though, Ledyard doesn’t think this will make developers themselves obsolete. Instead, it might mean rethinking what the role fully brings to the table and how expertise is best leveraged at businesses.
“The reason we have developers is not to write the code, the reason we have developers is to have a computer do a function. We might have to ask, ‘what do you actually call a developer,’ but the function isn’t going anywhere.”
Coder also targets the burgeoning space known as “machine learning operations,” or MLOps. The focus is on the rising costs associated with the GPUs required to train machine learning and other algorithms within business operations. The Coder offering allows users to spin up workspaces, train the model, operationalize that training, and then retract when the training work is finished. Like the cloud use optimization Coder has always offered, this gives users and their employers access to the needed technology only for the time they need.
“We’re probably a year or so away from really hearing this in the market, but we’re getting around it now. Ultimately, we want to simplify and cloudify the developer experience.”
Where Coder wants to go next: the enterprise play
Like many organizations with storied histories, Coder now has its eyes set on a future in expanding its footprint without leaving its original customer base behind. Its platform offers an elevated experience to enterprise customers compared to the traditional open-source model. Ledyard says one of his key focus areas this year is building Coder into an enterprise-ready solution.
“Our CDEs are typically for individuals, or for smaller businesses that only have two or three developers,” Ledyard said. “A large enterprise with hundreds of users who wants this technology can’t do that on an individual basis. They just can’t work like that. So our goal is to provide the best enterprise CDE on the market.”
Ledyard notes that Setting Coder up for the enterprise world will be challenging. The company must ensure it meets all the regulatory compliance and security requirements that enterprises require of any new technology they onboard. GRC capabilities are already available within the enterprise platform, but Ledyard says the team will continue to innovate in the compliance area so enterprise customers can confidently utilize Coder’s tools.
“It’s new for many on our team, and I have to remind everyone that even though small shops and developers don’t necessarily have a need for this, large customers absolutely do,” Ledyard said. “We’re doing it far better than anyone else I’ve seen in our space.”
Part of this enterprise vision will also involve building the solutions to reflect the modular approach many tech vendors take, giving customers a base offering, and then developing a platform where users can add and remove complementary components as needed.
Ledyard also stresses that the shift towards enterprise customers will not leave Coder’s existing users behind. The open-source tools will receive the same level of attention and support even as the company extends its reach to fill the needs of larger organizations.
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