Cheap Visual Studio Code(VSCode) Online Solution

Microsoft just released Visual Studio Code Online preview.

When use it for full time development, Visual Studio Online pricing will charge about ~50$/month, if you are looking for an alternative much cheaper solution while has similar functionality of VSCode online, you can actually use code-server and host similar online service in your own cloud.

For example, I hosted code-server in my own kubernetes cluster deployed in Azure, I use B2S VM which only charge me for ~30$/Month, P.S, same VM also runs other worloads, so it is much cheaper than offical preview VSCode online. I built a docker image which contains golang, gcc/g++, dotnet core, python, nodejs and lua support, when use the service, you could have editing & debugging support online, which is pretty fancy for me.

I published Dockerfile and kubernetes deployment files in my repository

  1. Dockerfile contains necessary steps to build the image, to build it, you can run "docker build -t huangyingting/code ." and "docker push huangyingting/code" to dockerhub. You can also customize it and add software you'd like to use in dockerfile.
  2. code-server.yaml is the kubernetes deployment file, I use oauth2_proxy to restrict who can access the ingress service, to configure oauth2_proxy, please refer to my previous post, then run "kubectl apply -f code-server.yaml"

I also captured some screen shots to demo what you can do from the online service

  1. Online editing of big git repository
  2. Debugging python code