Quickly set up an OpenShift Development Cluster for your development team using CodeReady Workspaces by instantiating a single Terraform template with IBM Cloud.

Why use a web-based IDE?

Consider this: You’ve been asked to set up a new team-based development environment in the cloud; the first thing you might ask is, “Why?” Because, in your experience, it’s easier when developers install tools on their own machines and have more control.

While that rings true for many cases, it doesn’t mean that it’s the right approach for everyone, and it doesn’t mean that it scales well. 

Imagine that you manage a large team of developers, and you want everyone to develop in an identical environment where operations engineers or architects can define the team’s configuration. Also, suppose that you want the development environment to be configurable per microservice or per project, and that the development environment should represent a configuration as close to production as possible. You want your company’s single-sign-on to manage access, and you want to be able to ramp up a new team member immediately, with minimal configuration (if any). 

This scenario is exactly where having a cloud-based team development environment is probably the best way to go.  

The next question that you might ask yourself is, “What should I use?” 

CodeReady Workspaces

Let me introduce you to CodeReady Workspaces, a Kubernetes-based team development environment/IDE based on Eclipse Che. CodeReady Workspaces can handle nearly any language stack, is instantly as familiar as a desktop development tool and is compatible with Visual Studio Code extensions, yet it runs completely in the cloud:

Finally, you might ask yourself, “What is the next step? How do I set up or configure my CodeReady Workspaces environment?”

CodeReady Workspaces is available as an Operator on all Red Hat OpenShift clusters, but that first requires an OpenShift cluster with which to work. Rather than configuring everything manually, wouldn’t it be nice if a Terraform template was available that you could use to configure a new team development cluster in a single, atomic transaction? Well, you’re in luck. There is!

The OpenShift Development Cluster template

The OpenShift Dev Cluster Terraform template will create and configure a new OpenShift cluster on IBM Cloud, preconfigured for team-based development. 

This template will do the following:

1. Create an OpenShift cluster on IBM Cloud, which will automatically use the IBM Cloud single-sign-on and access management.
2. Install the IBM Cloud Operator into the cluster.
3. Install the CodeReady Workspaces Operator into the cluster.
4. Create an instance of CodeReady Workspaces inside of the cluster, so it is immediately ready for use.
5. Install the CodeReady Pipelines Operator into the cluster.

With the OpenShift Dev Cluster template, your team’s development environment can be created and configured in one simple step. 

How to get started

You can use IBM Cloud Schematics to deploy this Terraform template in the cloud without having a local Terraform configuration. Just click this link: Deploy to IBM Cloud

Or, if you’d rather use Terraform locally, simply clone the OpenShift Dev Cluster template from here and run a terraform apply command to kick things off.