Cloud development Meets Agentic AI: Kiro and Red Hat OpenShift Dev Spaces

Organizations are adopting cloud-based development environments to enhance collaboration, standardize workflows, and accelerate innovation. Red Hat OpenShift Dev Spaces provides developers with consistent, secure, containerized workspaces running on OpenShift, reducing the complexity of local environment setup and configuration drift. Meanwhile, Kiro represents a new generation of agentic IDEs that use AI to transform how developers write, test, and deploy code—moving beyond simple autocomplete to spec-driven development that produces production-ready software.

Recently, Red Hat and Amazon Web Services (AWS) integrated Kiro with Red Hat OpenShift Dev Spaces, bringing together the best of cloud-based development infrastructure with AI-powered coding assistance. This integration enables developers to harness Kiro intelligent coding capabilities while working within the robust, enterprise-grade remote development environments that OpenShift Dev Spaces provides.

The Power of Cloud Development Environments

Red Hat OpenShift Dev Spaces delivers a cloud development environment (CDE) that’s included with your OpenShift subscription. It provides development teams with pre-configured, consistent workspaces that run on OpenShift’s Kubernetes platform, offering several key advantages:

• Consistency Across Teams: Every developer works in an identical environment, eliminating “works on my machine” problems
• Rapid Onboarding: New team members launch a fully configured workspace from a devfile and start coding in minutes – no setup guides, no dependency debugging, no waiting on IT tickets
• Enterprise Security: Centralized control helps maintain compliance with security policies and data governance requirements
• Resource Optimization: Run builds, tests, and AI workloads on cluster resources instead of consuming resources on a developer’s laptop – especially valuable when working with large monorepos or resource-hungry language servers.
• Collaboration: Because every workspace is defined by the same devfile, code reviews, pair programming, and troubleshooting happen in identical environments – eliminating configuration as a variable.

At the heart of Dev Spaces is the devfile – an open standard that declaratively defines a workspace’s languages, tools, runtimes, and dependencies. This means development environments aren’t just consistent – they’re codified and version-controlled alongside your application, so that every workspace is reproducible and aligned with your project’s actual requirements.

Kiro: The Agentic IDE Revolution

Kiro takes a fundamentally different approach to AI-assisted development. Rather than simply generating code from prompts, Kiro implements spec-driven development—a structured, three-phase methodology that prioritizes planning, documentation, and maintainability. Built on the open-source foundation of Visual Studio Code, Kiro introduces autonomous agents that can generate project plans, create files, run tests, and update documentation.

Key capabilities include:

• Spec-Driven Development: Converts high-level requirements into structured specifications before generating code
• Autonomous AI Agents: Agents work in the background to break features into sequenced tasks, complete with unit tests and integration checks
• AWS Integration: Integrated access to AWS services, documentation, and infrastructure code generation
• Contextual Intelligence: Deep understanding of your codebase enables more accurate suggestions and transformations
• Production-Ready Output: Focus on maintainable, professional software rather than quick prototypes

Bringing It All Together: Integration Architecture

The integration between Kiro and Red Hat OpenShift Dev Spaces uses a local-to-remote SSH workflow, allowing developers to run Kiro locally on their desktop while connecting to remote development workspaces running as containers in the OpenShift cluster.

When a developer launches a workspace, Dev Spaces reads the project’s devfile to provision a fully configured container — complete with the correct language runtimes, build tools, and dependencies. Kiro then connects to this pre-built environment over SSH, so the developer gets AI-powered coding assistance inside a workspace that’s already tailored to their project. There’s nothing to install or configure on either side beyond the initial SSH handshake.

This architecture provides the best of both worlds: the familiar, AI-enhanced local IDE experience combined with cloud-based compute and storage resources.

The integration uses SSH connectivity built into Kiro IDE, with port forwarding for smooth interaction between your local instance and the containerized workspace. No additional networking setup is required.

Getting Started: Step-by-Step Guide

Setting up Kiro with Red Hat OpenShift Dev Spaces is straightforward. Here’s how to get started:

Prerequisites :

• A running Red Hat OpenShift cluster with Dev Spaces 3.25 or later
• An AWS account with credentials for Kiro activation
• Kiro IDE supported OS (Windows, macOS, or Linux)
• Network access from local machine to the OpenShift cluster

Step 1: Install Kiro Locally

Download and install Kiro on your local desktop or laptop. Kiro is available for Windows, macOS, and Linux. Complete the initial setup and sign in with your AWS credentials to activate Kiro AI features.

Also, install the DevSpaces Local/Remote Support and Open Remote SSH  extensions in Kiro.

Step 2: Access Red Hat OpenShift Dev Spaces

Navigate to your OpenShift Dev Spaces instance. You can access Dev Spaces through:

• Your organization’s OpenShift Devspaces dashboard URL or you can try DevSpaces in Red Hat Developer Sandbox 30-day trial.

Log in with your Red Hat credentials to access your development workspaces.

Step 3: Select Kiro as Your Editor

In the OpenShift Dev Spaces dashboard, you’ll see the Editor Selector interface. From the available editor options, choose “Kiro (desktop) (SSH)”. This selection tells Dev Spaces that you want to connect your locally-installed Kiro IDE to the remote workspace.

Figure 1: Selecting Kiro in the Dev Spaces Editor Selector

Step 4: Establish the SSH Connection

To get started, select the DevSpaces Local/Remote Support extension icon from the Remote Explorer view in Kiro and paste your Dev Spaces workspace URL into the Cluster URL field. The URL follows this format:

https://${CLUSTER_URL}/${USER}/${DEVWORKSPACE_NAME}/3400/

Where:

• CLUSTER_URL is the hostname of your OpenShift Dev Spaces instance (e.g., devspaces.apps.mycluster.example.com).
• USER is your Dev Spaces username.
• DEVWORKSPACE_NAME is the name of your workspace

For example: https://devspaces.apps.mycluster.example.com/jsmith/my-project-workspace/3400/

Figure 2: Connecting to Dev Spaces in Kiro

Figure 3: Pasting the Dev Spaces workspace URL into the Cluster URL field in Kiro  Remote Explorer

Kiro will automatically detect and establish the SSH connection to your remote OpenShift environment. The first connection may take a moment as Kiro configures the remote workspace and synchronizes extensions.

Step 5: Start Developing

Figure 4: Kiro connected to a remote Dev Spaces workspace with full AI assistance and project files loaded

Once connected, you’re ready to code. Your Kiro IDE now has full access to the remote workspace running in OpenShift. You can:

• Write code with Kiro AI assistance and spec-driven development features
• Access files and resources in your cloud-based workspace
• Run builds, tests, and deployments in the OpenShift environment
• Uses AWS services through Kiro integrated AWS tooling
• Collaborate with team members who are working in the same standardized environment

Real-World Benefits

This integration delivers tangible value across multiple dimensions:

Consider a practical example: a new developer joins your platform team on Monday. They navigate to Dev Spaces, select the team’s repository, and launch a workspace — the devfile handles the rest, provisioning the right versions of Node.js, Go, and the team’s internal CLI tools. They open Kiro, connect over SSH, and within minutes they’re writing code with full AI assistance in an environment identical to what the rest of the team uses. Their first pull request is up before lunch, complete with Kiro-generated unit tests — no setup guide, no ‘works on my machine’ surprises.

For Development Teams: Combine the productivity gains of AI-assisted coding with the consistency and reliability of cloud-based development environments. Teams can onboard faster, collaborate more effectively, and maintain higher code quality through Kiro spec-driven approach.

For Operations Teams: Maintain centralized control over development environments while giving developers the flexibility to use cutting-edge AI tools. Security policies, compliance requirements, and resource management remain under IT control.

For Organizations: Accelerate time-to-market by removing friction from the development process. Developers spend less time on environment setup and configuration, and more time building features that deliver business value.

Pricing and Licensing

The solution offers straightforward pricing with no hidden complexity:

• OpenShift Dev Spaces is included with your OpenShift subscription at no additional cost
• Kiro is licensed separately based on your organization requirements
• There’s no special joint pricing—simply use the tools you need with the licenses you already have

Looking Ahead: The Future of AI-Enhanced Development

The integration of Kiro with Red Hat OpenShift Dev Spaces represents just the beginning of a broader transformation in how developers work. As AI capabilities continue to evolve, we envision development environments that are increasingly intelligent, adaptive, and collaborative.

AWS and Red Hat are exploring ways to further streamline the experience — including more automated connection setup, browser-based access to Kiro within Dev Spaces, and expanded agent capabilities for more complex development workflows.

The combination of cloud-based development infrastructure and agentic AI assistance creates a powerful foundation for the next generation of software development. By standardizing on tools like OpenShift Dev Spaces and Kiro, organizations can ensure their development teams have access to enterprise-grade infrastructure and cutting-edge AI capabilities—enabling developers to focus on what they do best: solving problems and building innovative solutions.

Get Started Today

Ready to experience the power of AI-enhanced cloud development? The integration is available now in Red Hat OpenShift Dev Spaces 3.25. Visit the OpenShift Dev Spaces documentation to learn more, or try it out in the Red Hat Developer Sandbox.

Together, Red Hat and AWS are committed to empowering developers with the tools they need to build the future—combining robust cloud infrastructure with intelligent AI assistance. So that development teams can work more productively in standardized, AI-assisted environments.

Additional Content

• Red Hat OpenShift Dev Spaces — Product page with overview, getting started guides, and downloads
• Getting started with Red Hat OpenShift Dev Spaces — Official documentation including installation, configuration, and administration guides
• Devfile.io — The open standard for defining cloud development environments used by Dev Spaces
• Managing IDE extensions in Dev Spaces — How to configure and manage editor extensions in your workspace
• Getting started with Kiro — Kiro documentation covering setup, spec-driven development, and AI agent capabilities
• Red Hat Developer Sandbox — Free 30-day trial environment to try Dev Spaces with Kiro

About Red Hat OpenShift Dev Spaces: Red Hat OpenShift Dev Spaces is a cloud-based development environment included with Red Hat OpenShift that provides developers with consistent, secure workspaces for building modern applications.

About Kiro: Kiro helps you do your best work by bringing structure to AI coding with spec-driven development, and Agentic AI development from prototype to production.