Gidpod provides ephemeral development environments. Run a Gitpod workspace and get a clean environment with precisely those components that have been configured for the use case or context you need to work in. Everytime a workspace is initialized and everyone who does that, the environment will be exactly the same. With the things that are installed and configured on top of the default image (that includes 20 tools including Docker, Docker Compose and browser based VS Code and 10 language runtimes) and provides 12 GB RAM, 6 vCores and 30 GB diskspace.
I have created a Gitpod workspace definition for an Oracle Cloud Infrastructure DevOps environment. It is visualized below. And it is started simply by going to this URL: github.com/lucasjellema/gitpod-oracle-cloud-infrastructure and clicking on the button Open in Gitpod. (if you do not have one yet, you need to create a free Gitpod account based on your GitHub or GitLab account – a one click step).
Once the workspace based on this definition is started (20-30 seconds), you have to provide your own OCI config file and your Private Key (.pem) file as per the instructions provided to you. Once these have been set, you can work with the OCI tools you are familiar with: OCI CLI, Terraform & OCI Provider, Fn client, VS Code extension Oracle DevTools and Kubectl (for interacting with OKE).
Here is a screenshot of the workspace while it is opening. The README.md document provides the configuration instructions to connect to your OCI instance.
You may wonder – how is this better than Cloud Shell and Code Editor ? Well, that is a pretty good combination as well and I do not mean to compete. For quick operations, you are probably better of with those.
For a clean, well known environment or an environment with exactly the intended configuration and resources – for example for a workshop – the Gitpod approach is better. The VS Code experience in Gitpod is richer than the IDE available in Code Editor – another benefit – and the resources available in Gitpod (memory, CPU) are more extensive than the cloudshell has on offer.
It is may expectation that you will use this Gitpod workspace definition as a starting point – Fork and Extend – for building an even richer OCI development environment.
