Red Hat acquiring agile and cloud-native development tools provider, Codenvy

USA: Red Hat is set to acquire Codenvy, a provider of cloud-native development tools that enable developers to more easily create modern container-based and cloud-native applications.

Historically, software engineers have spent more time each week on administration and other tasks, including environment management, than actual coding. And often, developers can find themselves working on multiple projects concurrently, but in different programming languages. As more IT organizations move to continuous delivery with DevOps and containers to speed the delivery of modern, cloud-native applications, developers have turned to new tools like Codenvy that can enable development teams to build complex applications faster with fewer inconsistencies across environments.

Craig Muzilla, senior vice president, Application Platforms Business, Red Hat said, "Thanks to the increasing push towards digital transformation and the use of technology platforms, including apps, as a strategic business advantage, the role of the developer has never been more important. But, accelerated innovation through agile development requires new approaches and tools. We are thrilled to add Codenvy's cloud-native development tools and containerized workspaces to Red Hat’s already expansive portfolio of solutions for building modern, cloud-native apps, to help make developers more successful.”

Codenvy, founded in 2013, is the first enterprise offering based on Eclipse Che, the popular open source cloud integrated development environment (IDE) and developer workspace server. Codenvy combines runtimes, projects and an IDE into a cloud-native developer tool that allows multiple developers to collaborate in the same workspace. Codenvy's portable universal workspaces and cloud IDE address the configuration and sharing challenges created by localhost developer workspaces to allow contributions to a project without having to install software. Codenvy runs in lightweight Linux containers, enabling instant startup and offering elastic scalability for building and running millions of workspaces. Codenvy's containerized workspaces are easily accessible via a browser without creating, maintaining and managing development environments.

By adding Codenvy to its existing portfolio of developer tools and application platforms, including Red Hat JBoss Middleware and Red Hat OpenShift, Red Hat continues its efforts to provide solutions that enable developers to create applications for hybrid cloud environments. Red Hat plans to make Codenvy an integral part of OpenShift.io, Red Hat’s recently announced hosted development environment for building hybrid cloud services on OpenShift.

Codenvy and Red Hat have already been working together to help developers accelerate cloud-native application development. Last year, Codenvy, Red Hat and Microsoft announced a collaborative effort to provide a common way to integrate programming languages across code editors and IDEs. The protocol was aimed at extending developer flexibility and productivity by enabling a rich editing experience within a variety of tools for different programming languages.

In 2016, Red Hat also joined the Eclipse Che community, adding contributors and committers focused on improvements around workspace runtimes, supporting orchestration and composition formats for workspaces and improving the edit / build / test lifecycle of container images from within the IDE. And, Codenvy is already embedded in Red Hat OpenShift, Red Hat’s award-winning container application platform, to make developing, debugging and deploying apps simple.

Now, with Codenvy as part of its Developer portfolio, Red Hat plans to make Eclipse Che and the Codenvy enhancements central to its tooling strategy and extend and integrate the workspace management technology across tools and platforms. OpenShift.io, which includes Eclipse Che, delivers application development tools and environments needed to help organizations maintain relevancy in a digitally transforming marketplace. OpenShift.io is designed to enable development teams, whether in the same building or across the globe, to more effectively collaborate and create containerized, microservices-based solutions, deployed to hybrid cloud environments.

Tyler Jewell, founder and CEO of Codenvy, Eclipse Che project lead said, “Cloud workspaces make contributing to software projects easy. It’s a simple concept that drove growth in codenvy.io and open source Eclipse Che. Our container-based approach to development aligns with Red Hat’s focus on improving security features, reliability and performance in its container offerings. Joining Red Hat opens up opportunities to expand our reach among developers, giving them modern tools to build containerized apps from within their Web browser.”