Hosted Seat

A seat is the hosted variant of the C2 Platform development environment. On the C2 Platform website, the term seat refers in the first instance to a C2 Platform-hosted environment running on C2 Platform infrastructure.

Overview

A seat is a managed development environment made available to users for Ansible engineering. It includes a development desktop, the required local tooling, project checkout, and the supporting configuration needed to develop, test, and run Ansible automation effectively.

The key advantage of a seat is not that it is more ready to use than a locally installed development environment. A local C2 Platform development environment can also be ready to use immediately after the one-command install, including the reference implementation needed to start creating, testing, and provisioning local nodes.

The main added value of a seat is that the engineer does not need a dedicated high-end developer laptop. Access can be provided from almost any workplace through a URL to the hosted environment. This is especially useful in constrained or air-gapped customer contexts where internet access is limited but access to an approved internal URL is still possible.

Collaboration and Learning

A local development environment that relies on local virtualization is normally a single-user setup. In contrast, a hosted seat can also support shared remote use. Users keep their own account, while the hosted setup allows them to work together in the same shared development desktop.

A hosted seat can also start from an individual development desktop assigned to one person. That person can share access with one or more other users by generating a URL with read-write or read-only access, depending on the collaboration scenario.

This makes a seat particularly effective for pair programming and mob programming.¹ It also works well for demonstrations, onboarding, and hands-on learning. It supports the C2 Platform goal of being not only an environment for developing open-source automation, but also a practical learning environment in which engineers can work together and learn by doing.

Relationship to the Local Variant

Within C2 Platform there are two main realization forms of the development environment:

1. Local self-managed environment: installed by the engineer on their own laptop or infrastructure, typically using the one-command install.
2. Hosted seat: provided by C2 Platform as a managed remote environment.

Both variants follow the same underlying engineering approach and can use the same open-source automation and reference implementation.

Open-Source Basis

The automation used for seats is open source. Organizations can therefore also use the same approach to provision their own hosted development environments, for example by using the c2platform.dev.desktop role together with an example configuration derived from the open-source C2 Platform setup.

Additional Information

• Development Environment: The development environment is a key C2 Platform concept for Ansible engineering: a reproducible setup that can be realized either as a local self-managed environment or as a hosted seat provided by C2 Platform.
• High-end Developer Laptop: An advanced developer laptop running Ubuntu 24.04 serves as the foundation for the local development environment. Its capabilities empower engineers to tackle demanding tasks efficiently.
• Pseudo Development Environment: A suboptimal variant of the Ansible development environment, often used in constrained customer settings like Dutch government domains.
• Run the Install Script: Learn how to run the one-command install script on the c2d-devtop node. The script executes the desktop role in local play mode to set up a personal development environment for a local user.