Gitpod Enterprise

What do you like best about the product?

Gitpod provides very fast VMs for using our codespaces on very end machines. It has allmost all of our Git platforms to connect and start coding with them. It has many code editors to launch their high end codespaces on them for our development. It also supports browser version of code editors to directly code through any browser and from anywhere we want.

What do you dislike about the product?

Its charges a bit high for limited time of VMs usage.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Gitpod has provided very high end VMs for our coding, which helps us launch very resource intensive code editors on any browser. It easily connects with all of our git providers, which helps us keep our code updated and managed from anywhere. It has all the code editors we want to code on, which makes our overall development process very simpler and easier.

What do you like best about the product?

Gitpod transforms our development workflow, making onboarding a breeze, enabling secure data access for BYOD setups without the need for a VPN, and enforcing best practices. Most importantly, it turbocharges engineer efficiency. Our engineers can be productive and deploy to production from day one and don't lose time with inconsistent environments. As a result, I (platform engineer) don't have to offer as much support, this having more focus time myself.

The initial dedicated SAAS setup, was up and running in no time. And the support we receive troughout the process has been tremendous.

What do you dislike about the product?

I am an intelij user and setting up the integration wasn't as easy as it was for VS code.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

- Slow onboarding
- No Data access for BYOD
- Inconsistent development environments

What do you like best about the product?

* Onboarding people is a matter of granting them access to gitlab repos, as soon as they have that, they can start coding. No need to deal with Windows laptops where you need admin for everything :D
* One unexpected benefit was that the environments are not only reproducible, they're also isolated: you can work on 2 branches at the same time by spinning up 2 gitpod workspaces.
* Prebuilds ease the pain of waiting for workspace boot.
* We could shut down our previous notebook solution thanks to gitpod using a vscode notebook plugin.

What do you dislike about the product?

The web IDE is close, but not quite the same as regular desktop experience, for example copy pasting shortcuts don't seem to work and of course there's some workspace boot time.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Onboarding users, reproducible environments (config in the repo itself). It benefits me personally because as a platform engineer, I have to spend less time configuring users' environments. Just click the gitpod button and code away.

What do you like best about the product?

Gitpod allows engineers to focus as much of their time as possible on delivering business value. With Gitpod, engineers don't have to worry about installing tools and can start coding right away. Gitpod workspaces boot up in seconds, run in the cloud (right next to your data) and thus also give you the power of cloud machines. Big enterprises typically don't gave very good engineering laptops, which is also solved by using a Cloud IDE such as Gitpod.

As an internal developer platform team, it allows us to onboard new engineers much faster than before. Where in the past people had to go through 20 documentation pages with all the tools that needed to be installed, this can now be provided by the platform team as a script in the .gitpod.yml configuration file.

What do you dislike about the product?

In general you see that the market is still quite young for cloud IDEs and that you can't use all the features of Jetbrain products yet. Next to that, plugins on the marketplace sometimes don't work.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

- Slow enterprise laptops
- Secure connectivty to data systems (data doens't have to be on personal laptops anymore)
- Onboarding people instantly without losing time
- Helping to bridge the disconnect between the "experimentation" and "industrialization" phases of the data product lifecycle. People can now run Jupyter notebooks right next to their code in an IDE. This promotes better writing of functions and prevents copy pasting code after the machine learning model experiments are done. In the past, when people finished developed a machine learning model in a notebook, they had to go to the next step, which is industrializing the code and making sure the predictions are run everyday or in real-time. People often had to copy paste code from a notebook to an IDE.

What do you like best about the product?

Not much at this point. Devcontainers in general are great

What do you dislike about the product?

When we started using gitpod, we were pretty happy. Throughout 2023 though, we've come to loathe our decision to choose gitpod over larger players like github codespaces or jetbrains space. Just this year, they have:

- Doubled prices (more than doubled for most use cases, in fact)

- Support has gone down the drain. We sent in our most recent tech question 9 days ago, still have not gotten an answer (and I can provide screenshots if needed)

- Dropped their open source. We use their SaaS product, but this leaves a horrible taste in our mouths. For years and years, they got lots of help/support/feedback from the community, precisely because they maintained an open source product that could be used by nonprofits, academics, etc. who might not have the funds to pay for SaaS. In one fell swoop, they dropped all of those folks. Now they're purely profiting off the backs of all that help the got from the community

We wish we had gone with a different company, and as soon as we can get the time to migrate, we will.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Cloud dev containers for software development