Attract — and retain — talent with a better developer experience
Cloud-native orgs attract the right kind of tech talent.
In a survey of government leaders conducted by PayIt and The Harris Poll, 83% expect the transition to digital government to improve employee job satisfaction and engagement in their organization.
If federal organizations want to attract top-tier developers, they need the right culture and tools in place. Federal organizations are probably already using cloud technologies for their projects, even if they don’t call it a “cloud”. By embracing the cloud fully to include cloud-native development, they'll attract the talent that frees them from reinventing the wheel so that they focus on innovation.
Government agencies are in the cloud
Cloud computing has advanced a lot since it became viable in the early 2000s, and whether an organization is using a hyperscaler like AWS or running an on-premise cluster, they’re using cloud technology. Today, even a lone developer with a tiny budget can design, code, and deploy a sophisticated application. They can do this thanks to compute, storage, and other services that are highly available, geographically distributed, and scalable.
Government agencies have started to realize this. The U.S. Department of Defense has opened Platform One, which combines modern cloud technologies for secure, flexible, scalable software development. The U.S. Navy’s Black Pearl program has made recent headway with security improvements.
Modern cloud computing has eliminated the burden of reinventing the infrastructure wheel, opening opportunities for innovative solutions, including the ability to attract talent.
Innovation needs the right tools
Security-focused federal organizations typically specify virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) to host developer environments. Government-furnished equipment (GFE) laptops typically run Windows, but cloud applications are usually on Linux. This creates obstacles in cloud development, which frustrates the developer’s experience and reinforces the perception that government agencies are slow and non-innovative.
A development environment is more than an IDE running on a workstation. It also contains build tools, package management, source code, and uses specialized hardware like GPUs. That’s a lot to put on a workstation or laptop.
Why not put the dev environment in the cloud to get the same benefits as the application being developed? For developers to build a modern application, they need a dev environment that runs on the same OS and stack that they deploy to.
Modern tools for modern development
For a productive developer experience, developers want their tools to match the sophistication and flexibility of the application they develop. A cloud development environment (CDE) provides exactly this.
A CDE uses the same principles and technologies that make cloud-based applications flexible, scalable, and secure. Imagine a set of development environments that are defined once then replicated and deployed consistently for dozens, hundreds, or thousands of developers:
- Developers aren’t limited to the fixed capacities of their workstation or their geographic location.
- They aren’t bogged down with tedious technical onboarding and long build times.
- Employees and contractors work from identical environments.
- Developers use tools they’re familiar with, including the same IDEs, Git provider, and so on.
Platform engineers and security teams also benefit:
- They use existing skills and infrastructure for both the CDE and applications.
- Managing and monitoring dev environments is consolidated to a single platform.
Better yet, a truly cloud-native development environment isn’t limited to development. Data science and machine learning teams work in environments that are impractical on workstations or VDI. They need cloud technology for GPUs and the ability to work with huge data sets measured in GBs and TBs.
Many industry-leading enterprises have made the switch to CDEs for measurably big increases in developer productivity and dramatic drops in infrastructure costs. A DevOps team at Palantir Technologies reports build times that are 78% shorter. Skydio, the leading US manufacturer of defense and industrial drones, reduced its cloud spend for development by 90%.
Top talent wants to innovate, so let them
Agencies are already halfway there if they’re using cloud technologies to tackle the demands of scalable, resilient, and secure infrastructure. They can take the next step by fully embracing cloud-native development to grow a culture of innovation that attracts (and retains) top-tier developers.