Ephemeral Container-based Dev Environments

As developers we do everything in containers, except set up our development environment. Most of us have not yet replaced lengthy README's with essentially a Dockerfile.

In this talk I will show how we use containers to spin up ephemeral development environments, automating the toil that surrounds setting up and maintaining a development environment. For more than two years now we've been developing an open-source project called Gitpod which orchestrates such development environments based on Kubernetes.

This talk is very much a real-world experience report from a core developer working in the trenches of a cloud native SaaS product, obviously including live demos. Our dev setup
* Centers around a VS-code online (read, in-the-browser) IDE with Docker-backed terminals,
* Integrates a Git-ops approach with prebuilt workspaces (`go get/vet/build` running before you open your IDE),
* A ready-to-go `kubectl` setup for each member of the team

As a boon, workspaces are isolated and thus no longer mess up our local setups or interfere with each other.

We aim to show how modern, cloud-native dev environments can immensely benefit us as developers.
Packed with real-world examples this talk will leave the audience with loads of new ideas of how they can improve their own dev environment.

Christian Weichel (Gitpod)
Jan Köhnlein (Gitpod)