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VOOZH | about |
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Codeanywhere was one of the first web-based code editors when it was released in 2009 (as PHPanywhere). Since that time, entire developer environments have migrated to the cloud and Codeanywhere has found itself slipping behind in the ultra-competitive Cloud IDE market, where newer products like GitHub Codespaces and Replit have taken center stage. To rectify that, three Codeanywhere veterans — Ivan Burazin, Vedran Jukic and Goran Draganić — are launching a brand new company, called Daytona.
Daytona is being promoted as “a secure alternative to GitHub Codespaces” and offers a twist on the successful cloud IDE formula, by allowing enterprises to “self-manage” Daytona on their own infrastructure. I spoke to co-founder and CEO Ivan Burazin to find out more.
Before we get to the competition with GitHub Codespaces, let’s first clarify how Daytona differs from its predecessor, Codeanywhere.
“The main thing is that Codeanywhere is more of an interface product and this [Daytona] is more of an infrastructure,” said Burazin.
By “interface” he meant that Codeanywhere simply provided a cloud interface to a developer environment that it hosted. But Daytona is more complex than that.
“What we learned from building out Codeanywhere was actually the infrastructure that we spun up underneath,” Burazin continued. “And the knowledge of how to spin these development environments up effectively, is basically what Daytona is.”
With Daytona, a developer can use their local IDE instead of (or alongside) a cloud-based one. So if they already use a software product like VS Code or a JetBrains IDE, it is compatible with Daytona.
“The thing that we do is we remove the developer environment from the local machine into the cloud, or remote server, or whatever,” said Burazin, “and all the connecting of that remote developer environment with the IDE is what we do in the background; and we spin them up and spin them down. And the user, the developer, feels like they’re working locally.”
Now, it should be noted that GitHub Codespaces also allows its users to work on local environments. On its homepage, GitHub notes that Codespace users can “use Visual Studio Code, Jupyter, or JetBrains.” This is enabled via extensions in those particular desktop software products. But, GitHub clarifies in its FAQ, the actual hosting of a codespace is done in GitHub’s cloud.
What Daytona is offering is essentially the ability to self-host development environments behind a firewall. This is the core difference from GitHub Codespaces.
In order to focus fully on Daytona, Burazin and his co-founders are ceasing work on Codeanywhere — it will “wind down eventually,” said Burazin.
So what was the motivation to build another cloud IDE product, especially given it’s already a crowded field? Burazin replied that the research they did indicated that enterprise companies want a secure, scalable development environment that works across local machines and cloud.
The word “secure,” by the way, is doing a lot of work here. When Daytona says that it is “a secure alternative to GitHub Codespaces,” it simply means that the ability to self-host (behind a firewall) is inherently more secure than hosting on an external provider (like GitHub).
According to Burazin, there weren’t many options on the market that offered self-hosting, and so he said that many companies built internal products to satisfy that need. He mentioned Uber, Shopify, LinkedIn and Eventbrite as examples.
Other companies, Burazin continued, have tended to rely on technologies like Citrix Server to enable remote access to IDEs outside of the corporate firewall.
“To make sure the code is secure, they would essentially give them a VM [virtual machine] inside the firewall, and the only way for developers to interface with that would be through Citrix Terminal Services. And so they’d essentially have to stream the IDE; so it was laggy, slow, a pain in the butt. So a product like Daytona allows enterprises to spin these developer environments securely behind the firewall, but the engineer or the developer can use a local IDE, so that it feels they’re working locally.”
Other than GitHub Codespaces, I asked Burazin who else is a competitor to Daytona.
“The closest competitors […] are Codespaces and Gitpod, in the sense of how the products were created — but neither of those enable you to self-manage it,” he said, adding that “the only product that does is Coder.”
Coder, which we’ve covered before on The New Stack, promotes itself as “Your Self-Hosted Remote Development Platform.”
Perhaps in order to differentiate, Daytona has coined a new acronym for its product: SDE, which stands for “standardized development environments.”
“SDEs not only provide a cloud-based development platform but also ensure uniformity across the development lifecycle,” the company stated in its launch press release.
I’m not sure a new acronym helps in a market already confused by what is or isn’t a “cloud IDE.” Daytona’s other main competitor, Gitpod, uses the term “cloud development environment” (CDE). According to Burazin, a CDE is “a subset” of the SDE concept.
Regardless of all the acronyms, the ability to self-host a development environment does seem like an enticing product offering to enterprises. The big question is whether GitHub (which of course is owned by Microsoft) will also offer that in due course. But for now, Daytona is primed to take on Coder with this functionality.
