I understand <i>why</i> they've done it, but I now consider this DOA. Open source without self hosting capability is just crowdsourcing your engineering team. Documented and supported or bust. The cloud is a prison.
This seems like an eminently reasonable thing to do, with the difficulties of supporting self hosted for a product like this on the infinite variety of customer setups. I can't imagine the time sink it must have been trying to support them all, it can't have been profitable.<p>It sounds like the dedicated version essentially lets enterprises run in on their own accounts while letting gitpod manage everything, which seems like a reasonable middle ground to me. Also sounds like you can still self host, they just won't support it directly as a customer, which again, seems reasonable.
Link to the actual webpage, not the GitHub source: <a href="https://www.gitpod.io/blog/introducing-gitpod-dedicated" rel="nofollow">https://www.gitpod.io/blog/introducing-gitpod-dedicated</a>
We were currently evaluating using GitPod in conjunction with our on-premise GitLab instance. This move by GitPod rugpulled the idea from us since we are handling national (non US) classified data and aren't allowed to upload that data or anything related to it to Cloud companies.<p>Edit: Misunderstanding, we are only evaluating GitPod, we already have a on-premise Gitlab instance.
Interested to see if they can successfully pivot to full SaaS. It seems like with the recent AWS announcement of CodeCatalyst and Github CodeSpaces (both of which are free with an additional easy to use paid model), Gitpod has been backed into a corner. I hope they do well, but the odds are stacked against them as the enterprise selling machines that are Amazon and Microsoft are incredibly difficult to fight as a startup. With Gitlab also apparently working on their version of CodeSpaces, it seems like maybe the best position for Gitpod is an acquisition (possibly by Atlassian).
Overall, I am glad that this shift in direction is happening for Gitpod. They are still leading the CDE movement (IMO) and this gives them a better chance at continuing to do that. I don't want this space to collapse into <i>just use codespaces, it's mediocre, but whatever</i> because innovators businesses couldn't keep their products alive long-term. Official support just doesn't feel like it was ever a money-maker, nor is it something that the target audience would really use IMO, at least not now.
Still self hosted alternative <a href="https://coder.com" rel="nofollow">https://coder.com</a> and Eclipse Che <a href="https://www.eclipse.org/che/" rel="nofollow">https://www.eclipse.org/che/</a>.<p>Both of them allow you to host VSCode or Theia on your own infrastructure.
> The open-ended requirements to run on commoditised Kubernetes services (GKE, AKS, EKS) forced us to manage variance and prevented us from driving innovation and fully realizing the potential of Cloud<p>Really? Looks like they shot their own foot there<p>"On-prem" usually doesn't mean "running on AWS but managed by us". Sure, some people will want it, but not most of them.
I think Gitpod is a great product, and I've had a massive amount of use of their free tier. There's something pleasant about throwaway Ubuntu development environments. I can cover pretty much all of the major development use cases in it, even container work.<p>I just hope they survive long enough to take off as they're giving a lot away for free currently. Their dedicated instance setup looks like it'll cover the majority of businesses who'll likely have their own landing zones and cloud controls they can integrate into. Not being able to self host is a loss, but it might the right trade off.<p>I don't understand the AGPL bit well other than it was seen like poison by corporate risk types at my previous jobs.
I hope Gitpod can continue to be successful given Microsoft seems to be doing their best to work against them through the horrible licensing of many popular VSCode extensions.