Part of my responsibilities as the Director of Infrastructure at KazooHR is to improve the developer experience. We have high standards with the quality of code that's shipped, so it's important that our team members are provided with tooling that makes their job both easier and enjoyable.

After getting a taste of cloud development from Github Codespaces in the Fall of 2020, I began to search for an alternative solution that would fit KazooHR's enterprise grade requirements. Eventually, I came across Coder, and in the Spring of 2021 we signed a one-year contract with the vendor to provide the solution. Why did we pick coder? I talk about a lot of the benefits in a published interview, but strategically it boiled down to a few key points:

• We wanted to provision instances with more than 2GB of memory. Github doesn't allow you to configure resources for CodeSpaces.
• We didn't want to make sacrifices to our cloud security. If the instances were hosted outside of our infrastructure, then we'd have to decide on a trade-off between security & what you could use the instance to work on.

Nearly a year later, our experience with Coder has been great. The implementation process was easy for my SRE team to execute, and our software engineers have adopted it en mass. It's safe to say this point, cloud development is here to stay at KazooHR.

Have you tried Coder, Codespaces, or a different solution for cloud development? Share your questions & comments below!