Red Hat has updated its cloud-native CodeReady Workspaces development environment with support for Visual Studio Code extensions, an air-gapped install feature, plus user interface enhancements.

Announced at the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon event in San Diego, CodeReady Workspaces 2 builds on the first version, released in February. Pitched as a cloud-native development workflow for developers, it enables applications and services to be built in an environment that mirrors that of production, running on Red Hat’s OpenShift container platform.

Among the new capabilities added is support for Visual Studio Code extensions, enabling users to take advantage of the wealth of languages, debuggers, and tools that have been created as extensions for Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code. However, CodeReady Workspaces also supports other desktop IDEs, according to Red Hat.

Also new is an “Air-gapped” install option that enables CodeReady Workspaces to be downloaded, scanned, and moved into a secure environment with limited or no access to the public internet.

With Devfile, users can now create and distribute centralised one-click developer workspaces. A ‘devfile’ specifies everything that a team of developers need to start working, such as source code repositories, resource allocations, build tools and application runtimes.

Red Hat also states that CodeReady Workspaces now offers production consistent containers for developers.  This clones the sources where needed and adds development tools such as debuggers and test tools as sidecar containers so that the running application container mirrors how it will be deployed in production.

In a statement, Red Hat vice president of Developer Tools Brad Micklea said “Red Hat is working to make developing in cloud native environments easier offering the features developers need without requiring deep container knowledge. Red Hat CodeReady Workspaces 2 is well-suited for security-sensitive environments and those organisations that work with consultants and offshore development teams.”

CodeReady Workspaces is included in Red Hat OpenShift and will be available in the OpenShift OperatorHub in the next few weeks.