How to Cut Cloud Costs and Govern AI in Developer Workspaces

In this episode of the AppDevANGLE, Paul Nashawaty (Principal Analyst, Application Development) and Rob Whiteley (CEO of Coder) dive deep into the challenges facing modern developers. Research shows developers spend up to 66% of their time on environment maintenance rather than innovation, highlighting an urgent need for change. Rob explains how Coder is solving this by shifting the entire software development lifecycle—including the critical step of writing code—to the cloud using secure, modular, container-based workspaces. Learn how platform engineering is evolving to support scale, security, and the future of AI coding agents. Key Highlights - The Developer Productivity Crisis: Over two-thirds of developer time is spent on maintenance and inefficient workflows, not innovation. - Shifting to the Cloud: The strategy of moving the last piece of the software development lifecycle to the cloud for safety and productivity. - Governing AI Coding Agents: The challenge of introducing AI tools like autonomous agents while maintaining security, compliance, and protecting intellectual property (IP). - The Changing Definition of a Developer: How the rise of data scientists, low-code users, and "vibe coders" are expanding who writes applications, increasing the need for centralized governance. - Container-Based Workspaces & Standardization: How Configuration as Code allows platform teams to standardize developer environments, dramatically accelerating onboarding and improving CICD reliability. - Massive Cloud Cost Savings: Achieving an estimated 75% reduction in cloud spend by utilizing on-demand and auto-scaling compute to eliminate resources that sit idle 70% of the time. - The Future of Platform Engineering: Creating secure, sandboxed workspaces where both human developers and AI agents (treated as untrusted third parties) can collaborate safely.