Gitpod abandons self-hosted product in favor of dedicated cloud

Gitpod abandons self-hosted product in favor of dedicated cloud

Gitpod, which provides remote development environments, has ceased development and support (other than what is already contractually agreed) for its self-hosted product and in its place will offer what it calls Gitpod Dedicated.

This is an isolated single-tenant instance initially available only on AWS, and which is managed by Gitpod. Gitpod Dedicated currently has limited availability but will have “an expanded beta in 2023,” according to a post introducing the service.

In December 2019 the company said: “There are many situations, especially in the enterprise, where working on your source code on a third-party cloud service is out of question,” giving as examples cases where the code must remain behind a firewall, or where the application needs access to local services such as a company database. Gitpod self-hosted runs on Kubernetes and integrates with on-premises versions of GitHub and GitLab.

Gitpod now says that “self-hosted Gitpod has been increasingly difficult for us to support and it has shown to be a burden for our clients to manage and operate their own Gitpod instances.” It adds that “the open-ended requirements to run on commoditised Kubernetes services” restricted its ability to innovate. In mitigation, the company also said that “we will move all of our source code to open-source AGPL and remove the proprietary Enterprise License from our source code.”

Regarding security in Gitpod Dedicated, the team said that “we can run in your cloud account or ours, in the region of your choice, and customers will have the ability to manage encryption keys for data at rest.” Although the initial offer is AWS only, there is an implication that other cloud providers may be added in future. Gitpod runs its main service on GCP (Google Cloud Platform).

Gitpod has also introduced an option for more powerful workspaces. Previously, all Gitpod workspaces included 4 virtual CPUs, 8GB RAM and 30GB storage. Now there is an option for 8 virtual CPUs, 16GB RAM and 50GB storage.

The pricing model has also changed, and is based on a monthly per-user fee (alongside a free plan) and per-usage billing. Previously, a Professional plan cost €23 per month and bought unlimited hours for up to 8 parallel workspaces. The new billing will cost more for intensive users. The old billing is available to existing users until the end of March 2023.

Gitpod was a pioneer of remote development environments and unlike GitHub Codespaces, its most obvious rival, works with GitLab and Atlassian Bitbucket as well as with GitHub. Gitpod also says it is more efficient because its product is based on containers on shared servers rather than dedicated virtual machines – though AWS Distinguished Engineer Anthony Liguori told us that “all customer multi-tenancy isolation is done through virtual machines” for security reasons. GitHub likewise says that “two codespaces are never co-located on the same VM.”

The independence of Gitpod versus the Microsoft-owned GitHub, and its commitment to open source, are points in is favor though. It also has a partnership with JetBrains for remote development using the JetBrains Gateway.