Over the last few years cloud-based integrated development environments (IDEs) such as Gitpod or GitHub Codespaces have gained a lot of popularity. Devpod is an Open Source technology option in this field and Google has recently released IDX in beta. Most likely there will very be more additions in the near future.

With this talk I would like compare and contrast the features of these technologies as opposed to traditional ones and highlight how container technology serves as the base technology to make this happen.

This includes the devcontainer specification.

Furthermore, I will explore the advances made in this field and discuss the limitations that still exist.

The intended take-away for the audience is to see the ease and efficiency for developing polyglot, container-based distributed applications.

The live demo will show how a developer can start coding away in seconds without the need to set up any build environment for a magnitude of predefined programming languages.