Coder is a platform for quickly provisioning standardized coding environments, following the development environments in the cloud practice we've described before. Compared with similar tools such as Gitpod (now rebranded as Ona) and GitHub Codespaces, Coder offers greater control over workstation customization through Terraform. It hosts workstations on your own infrastructure, whether in the cloud or in a data center, rather than on a vendor's servers. This approach provides more flexibility, including the ability to run AI coding agents and access internal organizational systems. However, this flexibility comes with tradeoffs: More effort to set up and maintain workstation templates and greater responsibility for managing data security risks in agentic workflows.
