Workshop: Container Developer Environments. Virtualizating your IDEs for embedded projects

In 2025 at QA&Test, I presented on Cloud and Hybrid developer environments for embedded projects. Embedded development and QA is entering a new era of development enabled by Cloud Development Environments (CDEs) like GitHub Codespaces or Devcontainers, where fully configured workspaces can run on laptops, Kubernetes clusters, or public clouds. Containers and VMs, often managed with tools like KubeVirt and QEMU, and wrapped by frameworks like Testcontainers, enable scalable, hardware-aware test setups that support HIL testing, firmware validation, and system modeling. It might sound like a miracle, but it’s actually possible with modern tech stacks!

During this workshop, we will go through building a containerized developer environment for a robotics project using the open-source ROS2 stack (C++/Python, CMake, custom build tools, Gazebo, etc.), or by using another example nominated by the audience.  Step by step, attendees will learn to define and customize Dev Containers for their technology stacks, adapt IDEs for embedded workflows, and package the full environment for sharing across teams and reuse in CI/CD pipelines.

We will also explore how these same environments can be moved beyond the laptop and executed in cloud-based development platforms such as GitHub Codespaces and similar providers. In addition, the workshop will demonstrate how tools such as Testcontainers and API-mocking frameworks can support integration testing even in embedded projects, where external services, simulated devices, and distributed components increasingly play an important role. Last but not least, we will look into leveraging the local AI capabilities of Large and Small Language Models in our developer environments and tests, with Dev Containers features and Testcontainers extensions.

By the end of the session, participants will have a clear understanding of how to virtualize their IDEs, standardize developer onboarding, and create reusable development environments that connect local workstations, cloud platforms, and automated pipelines.