The platform engineering community has just published our latest report, following through on our full force focus into learning and best practices, we break down Cloud Development Environments for Platform Engineers. 

There are 3 megatrends defining the software engineering universe at the moment: the rise of platform engineering, the massive impact of AI-powered development, and the risks and demands of cybersecurity.

CDEs, which are preconfigured cloud-native environments that automate, secure, and standardize workflows. They remove local setup, speed onboarding, and unify the development lifecycle drive and support all of these “megatrends”.

• For platform engineering, while IDPs manage the broader ecosystem and “outer loop” workflows. CDEs focus on the developer’s “inner loop” of coding, testing, and iterating.
• CDEs replace local setups with secure, ephemeral, policy-enforced workspaces, cutting the attack surface massively. Pretty crucial in an era where AI can drive 36K attacks a second and breaches cost $4.88M on avg.
• AI & PE are symbiotically connected and CDEs support this perfectly. Embedded into IDPs, they streamline every layer of the AI workflow from provisioning compute to using code assistants to deploying agents, within a governed, auditable, and secure environment.

Does your internal developer platform NEED a CDE? Maybe not. Would a CDE help? Probably. Should you understand exactly what CDEs are and whether they will drive your platform engineering, AI or security goals?

Absolutely. So go find out.