Cloud development environments 101: glossary, definitions and frequently asked questions

Cloud development environments (CDEs) are on-demand platforms that provide developers with the necessary tools, libraries, and dependencies to write, test, and review code. They help shift a platform team's influence leftwards, enabling them to control development environments while increasing autonomy for developers. Key concepts related to CDEs include self-hosted, vendor-managed deployments; self-hosted, self-managed deployments; ephemeral development environments; workspaces; prebuilds; multi-tenancy; single-tenancy; virtual private cloud (VPC); immutable infrastructure; bring your own device policies (BYOD); virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI); desktop as a service (DaaS); Cloud Integrated Development Environment (IDE); Single Sign-On (SSO); secure access workstation (SAW); privileged access workstation (PAW); privileged access management (PAM); OpenID Connect (OIDC); Secure Shell (SSH); software supply chain security; Service Organization Control 2 (SOC2); access controls; zero trust; data encryption; policy as code; threat modeling; Kubernetes; containerization; Docker; Vagrant; Docker in Docker; Docker Desktop; microservices; serverless architecture; event-driven architecture; service mesh; network isolation; version control system integration (VCS Integration); infrastructure-as-code (IaC); CLI; APIs; VS Code for the web (browser); VS Code desktop; command line (SSH); browser terminal; Jupyter Notebook; IntelliJ IDEA; GoLand; PhpStorm; PyCharm; CLion; RubyMine; WebStorm; Amazon Web Services (AWS); Backstage; Bitbucket; GitHub; GitLab; internal developer portals; JetBrains Gateway; Tailscale; Visual Studio Code (VS Code); Vim; code reviews; pair programming; DevOps; and DevSecOps.