Gitpod Flex, Cloud Development after Kubernetes
InfoQ Homepage News Gitpod Flex, Cloud Development after Kubernetes
Gitpod, a cloud development environment platform, recently decided to move away from Kubernetes after six years of use and experimentation. This decision emerged from their experience of managing development environments for 1.5 million users, while handling numerous environments daily.
Christian Weichel, CTO and co-founder, and Alejandro de Brito Fontes, staff engineer at Gitpod, elaborated the journey to this decision in a blog post. Gitpod found that while Kubernetes is well-suited for production workloads, it presents significant challenges when used for development environments.
The nature of development environments also contributed to these challenges. Unlike production workloads, development environments are highly stateful and interactive, with developers deeply involved in their source code and changes. They show unpredictable resource usage patterns and require elaborate permissions and capabilities, often needing root access and the ability to install packages. These factors make development environments different from the typical application workloads and inform Gitpod's infrastructure decisions.
