A cloud development environment (CDE) uses workspaces and templates to provide a productive, useful environment for developers while avoiding costly and frustrating inconsistencies. A template declares what's in a development environment and how its parts interact, allowing developers to consume it to create their own workspace. This approach promotes iterative collaboration between the platform engineering team and developers, enabling flexibility and maintainability as the organization's CDE adoption matures. Templates are considered code, providing benefits such as consistency, repeatability, auditability, reliability, performance, and security. Workspaces are consistent but still flexible, offering customization options through template parameters and access control features. The "everything-as-code" approach in a CDE allows for flexibility in the cloud, enabling the platform team to maintain templates while developers use them to create their own workspaces.