Since Space On-Premises will be deployed within the user’s network, the focus is more on its containerized nature than on providing a remote deployment experience. In other words, Space On-Premises aims to deliver on the promise of commercializing development environments and make it easier to deploy complete environments in a short amount of time, both for early or casual contributors and on machines for regular contributors. With this introduction, JetBrains addresses one of the most common forms of criticism in remote development environments such as JetBrains Space Cloud or GitHub Codespaces, particularly the loss of privacy and ownership of some parts of developers’ work. Being on-premises means that the user retains full control over the deployment, although this will come at a cost to system operation. Space On-Premises supports most of the features provided by Space Cloud, including Git hosting, code reviews and issue support, package management, team collaboration, and more. However, it has some limitations when it comes to features that require hosting on JetBrains. In particular, it can currently only use external workers for automation tasks. Most importantly, the beta doesn’t yet support development environments, though that feature will be available in the public release, JetBrains says. This is especially important for any developer or organization that wants to test the product in its current beta, as the ability to manage and create ready-to-use development environments is one of the most attractive features in these types of products. Space On-Premises comes in two modes, with support for Docker Compose or Kubernetes. The Docker Compose version is best suited, says JetBrains, for quick test runs or smaller organizations. The advantage of Docker Compose lies in its simplicity of configuration and management, which is based on a YAML file that describes the available services. The Kubernetes version, in contrast, is more flexible and supports larger organizations that need their installations to scale. While current users of Space do not have facilities to migrate from Space Cloud to Space On-Premises, this is something that JetBrains is currently working on and will become available at some point in the future. JetBrains plans to run the beta for 3-6 months, during which the product is available through a free license. At the end of this period, Space On-Premises will remain free for organizations of up to 10 users and will offer specific plans for larger organizations and enterprises.
