Cloud Development Environments: Mapping Key Approaches, Capabilities, and Vendors in 2025

This IDC Perspective explores the evolution and significance of cloud development environments (CDEs) and the ways they fit the agenda of software delivery and platform engineering teams. It discusses likely benefits and risks posed by CDEs and maps the competitive landscape, segmenting vendors based on their hosting and management approaches."CDEs revolutionize software development by enabling immediate project onboarding and a standardized experience for developers, massive scaling, security and governance consistency for the platform engineering team, and budget optimization for the finance team - ushering the inner dev loop into the cloud era," said George Mironescu, associate research director, Software Development and Delivery.