Remote Development Architecture and Benefits with JetBrains

Overall Architecture

The article introduces the concept of remote development, emphasizing the ability to connect to a remote environment within seconds from anywhere.

Why Remote Development Is Needed

Connect to a remote environment in seconds regardless of location

Leverage the powerful capabilities of remote computers.

Developers can work on any laptop, regardless of its performance, by using the computing resources of remote machines to handle large data sets and codebases.

Protect sensitive code on remote servers.

Storing source code on a developer's laptop poses security risks if the device is lost or mishandled; keeping code on a secure, company‑controlled remote server eliminates this danger.

Maintain environment consistency.

By reproducing the development environment with a predefined toolchain, runtime requirements, and hardware specifications, the classic “it works on my machine” problem disappears.

Bringing the Team into a Cloud Development Environment

Reproducible environments accelerate development.

Standardizing the whole team's environment as code allows instant onboarding; all required tools, libraries, and extensions are pre‑installed, enabling newcomers to start coding immediately.

Start coding instantly.

With a pre‑built IDE that is 100 % ready, developers can launch a pre‑configured workspace in seconds, write code, run projects, or debug without waiting for indexing or dependency downloads.

Team development proceeds smoothly.

Multiple branches or tasks can each spawn a temporary development environment that is destroyed after use, effectively treating each environment like a short‑lived Git branch and avoiding context‑switching overhead.

Effective resource control.

Administrators can manage who can use and manage project environments, select appropriate virtual‑machine types, and optimize resource costs according to project scale.

JetBrains Remote Development

Since version 2021.3, JetBrains added remote development support to all IDEs on the IntelliJ platform.

Developers can host source code, toolchains, and the IDE backend on a remote server while using a thin local client to write, navigate, refactor, run, debug, and test projects, experiencing the same workflow as with a locally hosted project.

Remote development works via SSH to an existing server; the IDE runs as a backend service loading the project without a UI, while the thin client provides the full user interface locally, even though all processing occurs on the remote server.

Video reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qG_BK11nLg

The entire workflow is managed by JetBrains Gateway, a compact standalone application that bundles the necessary plugins for all JetBrains IDEs.

JetBrains Client runs locally and provides the UI for the IDE backend. Built on the IntelliJ platform, it offers the same editor, code completion, navigation, inspection, and refactoring tools as a full local IDE, while all files and language processing reside on the remote server.

For teams that want to leverage powerful cloud servers, create reproducible clean development environments, and avoid losing important source code on a laptop, remote development is an excellent solution.