Loft Labs has made available an open source software project that enables DevOps teams to programmatically create developer environments using a tool that runs entirely on a local client.

Lukas Gentele, Loft Labs’ CEO, said DevPod provides an alternative to cloud-based approaches such as Codespaces from GitHub that lock organizations into a specific platform for building applications.

Instead, DevPod can automatically spin up developer environments as code on any public cloud or on-premises IT environment that can run a devcontainer.json file, he added.

In addition, DevPod will also automatically put developer environments to sleep when not being used to reduce costs, noted Gentele. Other capabilities include support for prebuilds, Git and Docker credential synchronization.

DevPod was created by Loft Labs to streamline the development of a virtualization platform for Kubernetes clusters. The company is now making DevPod available as open source software that any DevOps team can use to manage developer environments as code more easily than complex server-side alternatives, said Gentele.

It also makes it easier for developers to switch between cloud-hosted and local environments as needed seamlessly, he noted. That’s critical because it enables organizations to reduce dependencies on cloud computing environments for writing code by allowing developers to use their local machine whenever they prefer, noted Gentele.

Despite the ubiquitous availability of cloud services, most developers continue to prefer to write code on a local machine. The challenge is that replicating a developer environment elsewhere to foster collaboration has been problematic. DevPod provides a means for developers to collaborate with each other and with software engineers without giving up the inherent flexibility a local development platform provides.

At a time when organizations are more dependent on software than ever, there is much more focus on developer productivity. DevOps teams have historically tended to focus on DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) metrics that focus more on deployment frequency and mean-time-to-recovery than they do on developer productivity.

Of course, measuring developer productivity is an inexact science. An organization might once have tracked lines of code written to gauge productivity, but that is not especially good metric. In more recent times, metrics have been developed that, among other things, keep track of how much time developers spend actually coding versus maintaining their software development environment.

The issue that most IT leaders will immediately encounter is that every minute developers spend on these tasks, however, is one less minute they spend writing the business logic that drives an application.

Obviously, there’s no way developers are going to write business logic daily for eight hours straight; there are maintenance windows. However, application development is as much art as it is science. No one knows for sure when inspiration might strike, but if developers are busy maintaining code created to provision infrastructure, it’s less likely they’ll have a flash of brilliant insight that allows them to make an application better. The easier it is to spin up a development environment, the more likely it becomes that inspiration will one day turn into code that runs in an actual production environment.