News

Gitpod Announces Features, Forum, Funding

• By John K. Waters
• April 8, 2021

Makers of the Gitpod solution for automating the provisioning of ready-to-code dev environments, today announced new support for Visual Studio Code (VS Code), the upcoming launch of its first community event, and some serious venture support.

Gitpod is an open-source solution that leverages the Git version control system as the canonical source of truth to automate everything a developer needs to start coding. The solution was architected by the company's co-founder and CEO Sven Efftinge, to "free engineering teams from the friction of manually setting-up local dev environments, to save dozens of hours, and enable a new level of collaboration to create applications more quickly than ever before," the company says.

Gitpod provides a one-click, prebuilt, immediately productive environment for any GitLab, GitHub, or Bitbucket project. The company has added to that list with new support for the enormously popular VS Code, which is now the solution's default integrated developer environment (IDE).

The company also announced the implementation of new security based on namespace layering technology that will free users from previous constraints on things like Sudo privileges and Docker images.

Also, the entire dashboard has been redesigned to speed-up developers' workflows.

"Everyone in the world is building software, and most of them are wasting their time setting up dev environments locally," Efftinge told ADTmag. "That just doesn't make sense anymore, and I think people see that it's about time this problem gets solved. Using Gitpod, you can just do the same stuff that you would do locally, but now you can script it, automate it, and run it in the cloud."

Gitpod is currently used by 350k developers, the company says.

"While developers have a wealth of tools at their fingertips, integrating them all together and operating that patchwork quilt of technologies is a major gap in the developer experience," said RedMonk analyst Stephen O'Grady. "One important tool in addressing the problem is automation, which can lower the burden on developers to maintain these complicated pipelines. Gitpod's embrace of automated, higher quality developer experiences, therefore, is one to watch."

Gitpod also announced $13m in funding led by General Catalyst.

“Gitpod is obsessed with bringing back joy and speed to the modern developer experience,” said Steve Herrod, Managing Director at General Catalyst. “Devs today are struggling with larger codebases and more complex dependencies, leading to cluttered environments that hamper productivity and collaboration. Gitpod removes that friction and is on track to establish an essential new product category in modern software development.”  

The funding will help the company to expand its market share and grow its open-source community and relevant ecosystem partnerships, the company said.

The company also announced its first-ever community event. DevXConf is an online conference that will focus exclusively on "the daily experience of developers when trying to get their job done. The virtual event is scheduled for April 28-29, 2021.

"We write code within specific languages/frameworks, use tools, glue them together to (tool) chains, develop against APIs and communicate and collaborate with other developers," Efftinge said in a statement announcing the event. "All of that should be efficient, sustainable and joyful. At DevXConf some of the brightest minds from the community get together and have a conversation on how we can make software engineering more productive and fun."