Space, JetBrains’ approach to containerized, remote development environments, is now available locally as a beta for all organizations that prefer to be in full control of their tools rather than relying on third-party cloud services.
Because Space On-Premises will be deployed inside the user’s network, the focus is more on its containerized nature than on providing a remote development experience. In other words, Space On-Premises aims to deliver on the promise of commercializing development environments and making it easy to create full-featured environments in a short amount of time for both first-time contributors or casual contributors, and on a variety of machines for regular contributors.
With this introduction, JetBrains addresses one of the most common forms of criticism of remote development environments like JetBrains Space Cloud or GitHub Codespaces, specifically the loss of privacy and ownership of some parts of developer work. Being on-premises means that the user retains full control over the deployment, although this will have a cost to system performance.
Space On-Premises supports most features provided by Space Cloud, including Git hosting, code reviews and issue support, package management, team collaboration, and more. However, it has some limitations when it comes to features that require JetBrains hosting. Specifically, it can currently only use external workers for automation tasks.
Most importantly, the beta version does not yet support development environments, although this feature will be available in the public version, JetBrains says. This is especially important for any developers or organizations who want to try the product in its current beta version, as the ability to manage and instantiate ready-to-use development environments is one of the most attractive features in this type of product.
Space On-Premises comes in two flavors, with support for Docker Compose or Kubernetes. The Docker Compose version is best suited, JetBrains says, for quick trials or for smaller organizations. The advantage of Docker Compose lies in the simplicity of its configuration and management, which is based on a YAML file that describes the available services. Instead, the Kubernetes version is more flexible and supports larger organizations that need scale-out installations.
While current users of Space do not have the facilities to migrate from Space Cloud to Space On-Premises, this is something that JetBrains is currently working on and will become available at some point in the future.
JetBrains plans to release the beta for 3-6 months, during which production is available via a free license. At the end of this period, Space On-Premises will remain free for organizations with up to 10 users and will offer specific plans for larger organizations and enterprises.
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