DevPod is a client-only tool to create reproducible developer environments based on a devcontainer.json on any backend. Each developer environment runs in a container and is specified through a devcontainer.json. Through DevPod providers these environments can be created on any backend, such as the local computer, a Kuberentes cluster, any reachable remote machine or in a public or private cloud.

You can think of DevPod as the glue that connects your local IDE to a machine where you want to develop on. So depending on the requirements of your project, you can either create a workspace locally on the computer, on a beefy cloud machine with many GPUs or a spare remote computer. Within DevPod, every workspace is managed the same way, which also makes it easy to switch between workspaces that might be hosted somewhere else.

DevPod reuses the open DevContainer standard (used by Github Codespaces and VSCode DevContainers) to create a consistent developer experience no matter what backend you want to use.

Compared to hosted services such as Github Codespaces, Jetbrains Spaces or Google Cloud Workstations, DevPod has the following advantages:

• Cost savings: DevPod is usually around 5-10 times cheaper than existing services with comparable feature sets, because it uses bare virtual machines in any cloud.
• No vendor lock-in: Choose whatever cloud provider suits you best, be it the cheapest one or the most powerful, DevPod supports all cloud providers. If you are tired of using a provider, change it with a single command.
• Local development: You get the same developer experience also locally, so you don't need to rely on a cloud provider at all.
• Cross IDE support: VSCode and the full Jetbrains suite is supported, all others can be connected through simple ssh.
• Client-only: No need to install a server backend, DevPod runs only on your computer.
• Open-Source: DevPod is 100% open-source and extensible. A provider doesn't exist? Just create your own.
• Rich feature set: DevPod already supports prebuilds, auto inactivity shutdown, git & docker credentials sync and many more features to come.
• Easy Desktop App: DevPod comes with an easy-to-use desktop application that abstracts all the complexity away. If you want to build your own integration, DevPod offers a feature rich CLI as well.