Nimbus vs. Competition

GitHub Codespaces is Microsoft's pay-as-you-go cloud developer environment solution. Like with Nimbus, you can standardize environments, runtime requirements, hardware specs, and extensions. But with key differences.

Codespaces has built a completely managed service built on Microsoft Azure and using containers hosted on a VM. Nimbus lets you host your own service and provision VMs or containers.

They also prioritize Microsoft products (e.g. VS Code, Azure, Github). Nimbus is platform agnostic and supports what developers want - this includes Microsoft products but also Terraform, Jetbrains, other version control tools, IDEs, etc.

Gitpod is a start-up focusing on automating the provisioning of ready-to-code developer environments, like Nimbus. But, while Nimbus focuses on teams and complex products, Gitpod appears to focus on individual dev use cases.

They provide users with a shared 16vCPU 64 GB RAM machine that is containerized and allows users to access up to 12 GB RAM. These containers only run when a user is working in a pod making many tasks difficult or impossible on Gitpod.

Gitpod also uses its own YAML to set up environments and has been explicit about its preference for a managed solution, in contrast to Nimbus' push for utilizing popular tools like Terraform and self-hosted solutions.