Red Hat Inc. is trying to make life easier for developers who build their applications using software containers and manage them with Kubernetes.

The company, which will soon be acquired by IBM Corp., today announced what it says is the industry’s first Kubernetes-native, browser-based integrated development environment or IDE, called Red Hat CodeReady Workspaces.

Red Hat says CodeReady Workspaces is optimized for use with its Red Hat OpenShift platform and is the first IDE that can run inside a Kubernetes cluster. OpenShift is an open-source software platform that’s used to develop, deploy and manage “containerized” applications, which can be built once and run on any computing platform. Kubernetes is the most commonly used software for managing large clusters of containers.

For developers, CodeReady Workspaces is being billed as the missing piece of the container app development puzzle. Red Hat says it’s a comprehensive development environment that allows developers to manage their code, its dependencies and artifacts, directly inside OpenShift Kubernetes pods and the containers they host.

Essentially, it allows developers to take advantage of Kubernetes’ orchestration capabilities from the get go, as soon as they begin writing their apps. Previously, with IDEs not native to Kubernetes, developers could only tap into Kubernetes during the final phase of testing and deployment.

As a result, one of the main benefits of CodeReady Workspaces is that it can eliminate the need to move applications from development platforms to production systems once they’re complete.

Red Hat also promotes CodeReady Workspaces’ ease of use. Developers don’t need to be familiar with Kubernetes to get started as the IDE handles the complexities of the orchestration software all by itself.

There’s also a new feature for sharing code, called “Factories.” This allows developers to create a template of applications built using the IDE that includes the location of the source code, runtime and tooling configuration, plus any commands needed. So developers can simply send a link to their colleagues that allows them to collaborate on whatever projects they’re working on.

“Enterprise want consistent environments for their developers and they can achieve this with CodeReady,” said Holger Mueller, principal analyst and vice president of Constellation Research Inc. “This enables critical consistency for building next-generation applications. Not to mention the benefit of running developer and systems infrastructure on the same platform, allowing for consistent support, monitoring and operational frameworks.”

Red Hat said CodeReady Workspaces is available now for free to all OpenShift users.

Image: Red Hat