
AWS Cloud9 – Cloud Developer Environments - makeshifthoop
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-cloud9-cloud-developer-environments/
======
TheBrockEllis
I used Cloud9 (pre-Amazon acquisition) for teaching high schoolers the basics
of programming. It was super easy to set up and use. It really let me, as the
teacher, focus on teaching syntax and principals and less on 'toolchain
config', which is helpful for newbies right out of the box.

I haven't used this new Amazon Cloud9 offering, but from the initial
impression from the blog post, they've traded in the easy of use that Cloud9
once had for a deeper integration into the AWS ecosystem. The screenshots I
saw were not something I'd want a greenhorn to have to walkthrough.

I'm not sure what future I expected when Amazon purchased Cloud9, but I mourn
the potential loss of an awesome cloud based IDE that beginners could easily
pickup (my mind can be swayed once I give it a try though).

~~~
riffic
Don't mourn - the editor has been open source for years:

[https://github.com/ajaxorg/ace/](https://github.com/ajaxorg/ace/)

------
RawData
So disappointed with this!

I teach coding courses online...I've published dozens of courses teaching many
different programming languages to thousands of students. In every single
course, I recommend and use c9.io as the dev environment.

In one stupid swoop, Amazon has made all my courses obsolete.

Now people watching my videos can't create an account on C9, they have to sign
up for aws and use the completely different interface. People can no longer
follow along with the thousands of videos I've created.

I get that you bought C9 and want to integrate it. But why close down c9.io to
new accounts? Why can't they both exist?

So very disappointed...

~~~
chrisseaton
I think it's a bit mean to go around calling them stupid, because you chose to
make your course dependent on them. They (presumably) didn't promise you
anything and don't owe you anything.

~~~
RawData
We wouldn't want to hurt Amazon's feelings.

~~~
nathantotten
Well, in this case "Amazon" is actually a team of people.

------
linsomniac
I've dabbled with c9 before Amazon ingested them. It's part of my experiment
to see if I can use ChromeOS for my home machine, and so far it's going great.
At work I have a 64GB machine with 3 monitors and Ergodox, but for home I
don't need a lot.

I've been able to get ChromeOS to do OpenVPN and SSH, which cover 90% of work
responsibilities from home. Otherwise, I'm mostly in a browser, or SSHing to
my personal EC2 box. I don't get much programming time lately, but that is the
remainder of it, largely on github. So c9 is something I need to investigate
more.

So far ChromeOS is working great, and is far easier to maintain than Linux or
Windows. It is less capable in some ways, but I don't really need those ways
at home.

------
oneweekwonder
It is really easy as[0]:

    
    
      git clone git://github.com/c9/core.git c9sdk
      cd c9sdk
      scripts/install-sdk.sh
    

to get c9 installed. But the license[1] :(

There is a cloud9 v2[2] alterantive but ide.c9.io just more polished.

[0]:
[https://github.com/c9/core#installation](https://github.com/c9/core#installation)

[1]: [https://github.com/c9/core/blob/master/LICENSE-COMMERCIAL-
US...](https://github.com/c9/core/blob/master/LICENSE-COMMERCIAL-USE)

[2]: [https://github.com/exsilium/cloud9](https://github.com/exsilium/cloud9)

~~~
msumpter
There are also a few docker based installation options for self-hosting too. I
created one as well to run the container as my local user to not muck with
file permissions [https://github.com/msumpter/docker-
cloud9-ide](https://github.com/msumpter/docker-cloud9-ide)

------
Naac
For those looking for a similar, but open source equivalent cloud based IDE,
Eclipse Che[0] looks really promising.

[0] [https://www.eclipse.org/che/](https://www.eclipse.org/che/)

~~~
mcroft
It's come a long way. I was aware of Codenvy years ago and recently became
aware that they seem to have joined the Eclipse Che effort.

The main thing missing from Che, for me, was a lot of nice, easy plugins to
deploy to cloud services. You can run your app in the container very easily,
but it would be nice to be able to push to, say, Heroku right from the IDE.

Apparently Red Hat have acquired Codenvy now, so it will be interesting to see
if they add some integration for OpenShift (their own repackaged Kubernetes).

~~~
bmicklea
I'm the project lead for Che and can confirm that Red Hat will be contributing
changes that will allow Che to run on OpenShift, but it will also roll in most
of the enterprise features that were previously only available in the
proprietary licensed Codenvy product.
[https://www.eclipse.org/che/](https://www.eclipse.org/che/)

~~~
santiagobasulto
We're just starting to analyze Che for our coding school. Wouldn't all this
just be possible with the Terminal? I'm not saying plugins aren't good, just
trying to see if the terminal is a full featured one that would support
something like, for example, installing the heroku toolbelt.

I haven't even started with a real test, just reading about it, so sorry for
my lack of research, I'm just reading through the features
([https://www.eclipse.org/che/features/](https://www.eclipse.org/che/features/))
and saw the terminal, which is fundamental for us.

------
seanwilson
I really wish Amazon would choose more intuitive names for their AWS products
instead of trying to be clever especially given they must have around 100
products now.

AWS Cloud IDE or AWS IDE (cloud seems redundant) would give you a good idea
what this is without having to click the link for example.

Recently we've had AWS Lightsail, Fargate, Greengrass and Sagemaker which all
give you zero hint at what they are unless you read more plus they're hard to
remember. Even EC2, RDS and S3 should have been given better names.

~~~
deanCommie
You completely undermined your whole point with your last sentence.

I get that Lightsail isn't intuitive, but what could be more simpler or easier
to comprehend than Relational Database Service or Simple Storage Service?

~~~
seanwilson
> I get that Lightsail isn't intuitive, but what could be more simpler or
> easier to comprehend than Relational Database Service or Simple Storage
> Service?

Nobody calls those products by their expanded names though. Why not just AWS
Storage or AWS Database?

Google for example has Google Cloud Storage and Google Cloud SQL. I get that
it becomes trickier when you've got overlapping products but you can't even
guess the domain of AWS products from the name they're so obtuse.

~~~
alexbilbie
AWS has multiple storage and database offerings so having different product
names is helpful

------
PaybackTony
I've used c9.io for years. You're trading some nice IDE features you'll get
with VSCode or others for convenience, but not as many as you'd think.

Although the interface is rather out-dated, it's a solid IDE and I thoroughly
enjoy being able to just walk away from my code and pick it up anywhere on
anything.

With EC2 integration, it may cut out what I had been doing, which was turn up
a digital ocean droplet and use the SSH workspace in c9.io and boom, I had a
full VM to dev on that anyone can reach anywhere.

~~~
TimJRobinson
AWS Cloud9 also supports SSH workspaces :) (I work for AWS Cloud9)

~~~
MentallyRetired
What are you doing on hacker news? Go add a mobile breakpoint so I can ditch
my laptop altogether. ;)

(Fully converted to C9 6 months ago)

------
ohstopitu
I've been using c9 everytime I wanted to quickly prototype stuff (and not
setup the toolchain) and destroy workspaces when I'm done. I love this
integration with AWS.

Now I can just get a nice Chromebook and not necessarily spend 1000s on a
Macbook (not saying AWS Cloud9 is there yet as an editor to compare against VS
Code/Sublime etc.) but it's definitely awesome and I hope one day it'll get
there.

~~~
movedx
Learn Vim and use it in tmux on a VM or even in a Docker container you blow
away when you're done. You can use a Raspberry Pi then :P

~~~
ohstopitu
I've tried to learn vim multiple times (mainly so i could have a cheap vm +
mosh to use when i'm around). But I've yet to get used to vim coming from a
sublime/vscode/intellij background. (I can use vim to do the mundane stuff,
but developing stuff solely on vim appears slightly more difficult)

------
k__
I didn't even notice that Amazon bought Cloud 9.

Coming from Sublime -> Atom -> VSCode it looks a bit like the older versions
of the editors I used in the past.

~~~
purplerabbit
I come from Vim -> Atom -> VSCode -> Cloud9, and have become a deep C9
loyalist. I love the window management, terminal integration, speed, and ease
of configurability... No other editor I've used even comes close. And that's
to say nothing of its being cloud-based

~~~
k__
Hehe.

Does this cloud based part not lead to problems? Like what platforms is this
thing running on "in the cloud"?

~~~
purplerabbit
It's never lead to problems for me. However, some of my coworkers decided not
to use c9 due to latency (which has never bothered me for some reason.)

I use the ssh-workspace feature and do my work in an EC2 instance. I've also
been playing around with running a local c9 build
([https://github.com/c9/core](https://github.com/c9/core)). Not sure that
their license would make this viable for commercial work, but ofc there's no
latency / connection requirement if you're running it locally.

Off-topic, you could even run c9 locally in a Chromebook if you were using
Crouton -- and without having to install another desktop environment. I do
most of my work on a desktop, but if I ever get together a mobile development
environment this may be what I do.

------
Arqu
Not sure why people claim they lost everything, on the bottom of the page it
says: Things to Know

There are no additional charges for this service beyond the underlying compute
and storage.

c9.io continues to run for existing users. You can continue to use all the
features of c9.io and add new team members if you have a team account. In the
future, we will provide tools for easy migration of your c9.io workspaces to
AWS Cloud9. AWS Cloud9 is available in the US West (Oregon), US East (Ohio),
US East (N.Virginia), EU (Ireland), and Asia Pacific (Singapore) regions. I
can’t wait to see what you build with AWS Cloud9!

~~~
RawData
I can add team members if they already have an account...if not, there seems
to be no way for them to sign up.

------
znpy
If anyone is wondering there is a mostly-free-as-in-free-speech, self-hosted
alternative: Eclipse Che.

[https://www.eclipse.org/che/](https://www.eclipse.org/che/)

~~~
filereaper
Thank you! I've been looking for something like this for years!

~~~
znpy
Happy to help! I think it is a very good fit with the latest high-ram-low-
price instances from digitalocean.

------
mark242
Combine Cloud9 with a $300 touchscreen Chromebook and that's a hell of an
environment vs buying a $2000 Macbook.

~~~
sushisource
Is it though? Eventually the ec2 costs will outstrip your savings on the
macbook. $1500 a year ish for a reserved m4.large w/ 2 vCPU and 8G ram which
seems about comparable. That math doesn't work unless you're buying a new
macbook every 2 years.

edit: This bit is interesting though: If you’re running in AWS the auto-
hibernate feature will stop your instance shortly after you stop using your
IDE. This can be a huge cost savings over running a more permanent developer
desktop.

So perhaps the cost is quite a bit lower.

~~~
kayoone
You can also manually hibernate your instance once you are done with the work
for the day. I also suspect you won't need anything like a m4.large for most
dev environments but i see that you wanted some equivalent to a macbook pro,
so that makes sense.

------
nategri
This decade sure loves editors written in JavaScript

------
mattpk
Isn't Cloud9 an e-sports organization too? There are two cloud9s, wondering
where the Cloud[1-8]s went.

~~~
nulagrithom
[https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cloud_nine](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cloud_nine)

------
ajhit406
Not surprising to see the common complaints from learn-to-code authors about
disrupting their courseware. We heard this a lot at Nitrous.io and struggled
with the importance of the beginner market to our business.

When considering Nitrous as a viable business, I'd talk a lot about the
"developer sophistication spectrum" and the challenges of one single product
or service attempting to meet the needs of a lot of different types of
developers.

On the newbie side of the spectrum, serving the hot "learn to code" market
means scaling your potential market size by orders of magnitude. There is some
product-market fit here as newbies don't really have substitutes ("what's a
development environment?" they'd often remark), but the SaaS economics of
selling tooling to newbies was atrocious.

Selling to learn-to-code means you're dealing with an incredibly fickle
audience where 95% abandon their plans to become a professional programmer
within a few months. The other ~5% who become full-time programmers are
dedicated enough to their craft to learn about their OS and their options to
customize the local development workflow. So they naturally also churn.

(I don't have any knowledge of the market, but I'd imagine courseware
providers attempt to charge 100% up-front to account for the extremely high
churn. At least, that's how I'd charge.)

So basically all the cloud IDEs are getting hundreds of thousands of signups
from a lot of newbies saying "We love [Nitrous, Cloud9, Koding, etc...]!" but
not wanting to pay for the infrastructure and churning at unsustainable rates.

On the less sophisticated side of the spectrum, I think there is potential for
a viable cloud IDE business, but I think it needs to be closely coupled with a
content platform like Treehouse, Coursera or CodeAcademy. I haven't looked at
any of them recently, but I wouldn't be surprised if they have in-house teams
working to improve the editor experience and provide stateful experiences with
dedicated cloud compute & storage. We had a tightly coupled integration with
the Flatiron School and it was a pretty solid experience but just wasn't a big
enough business for us to scale. So in reality these businesses really just
look like a content / courseware business that has a really great cloud
development experience. But it's clearly built for people learning to code and
they're paying for the courseware, not for the editor.

As you move up the sophistication spectrum, developers begin to experience
"cognitive dissonance" when considering how much their time is really worth.
That is, when they know how to setup, configure or troubleshoot something
themselves, they underestimate the time they spend every month performing
those tasks. We spent a ton of time doing deep customer research with
excellent engineering teams at Airbnb, LinkedIn, Shopify, etc... You'd be
extremely surprised at just how much time it takes for the average developer
at a top-tier engineering org -- in some cases, new developers took _3-4
weeks_ to setup their dev environment. But after setting up a new environment
the other dev ops problems start to spider into a web of complex and
proprietary issues that are difficult to create compelling marketing / sales
presentations. It's like - everyone knows it sucks and it's broken, but nobody
quite knows the solution. Which is why a lot of the solutions emerge from open
source projects that solve specific issues organically and then expand into
powerful platforms that cohesively solve a set of interesting ops problems
(e.g. Hashicorp).

This is an oversimplification of the complexities of the developer market - as
there is also a spectrum of sophistication within the professional developer
market itself. The "intermediate" professional developer tends to be the best
market fit right now for cloud development / IDEs, as they often are self-
taught and know how to code, but are often not as versed in debugging low-
level issues, but usually are more price sensitive to their more sophisticated
counterparts (who don't want to use the service in the first place).

In any case, I remember reading a HN comment about the nitrous.io shutdown [1]
and feeling bad about not opening up more so I suppose this will provide some
color. People loved our service and we honestly loved building it, but
business is hard and we weren't able to uncover the right strategic focus.
Hopefully Coursera, Treehouse, CodeAcademy, etc... will continue to fill in
the gaps for the beginner market - but since those will be tightly coupled
with their courseware, it's going to be a difficult spot to be in for the
independent educator who is attempting to monetize their own material.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12841858](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12841858)

~~~
sjellis
There's a lot of really interesting things in this post, but I'm only going to
pick up one point:

"As you move up the sophistication spectrum, developers begin to experience
"cognitive dissonance" when considering how much their time is really worth."

I am pretty sure that one of the reasons why cloud IDEs have struggled is that
plenty of professional developers consider that learning an IDE or editor is a
time investment that pays returns over a long period of time. On the extreme
end of the scale, I still get near-daily use from the Vim knowledge that I
picked up well over a decade ago. Investing personal time learning a cloud IDE
may not be such a good investment, because those skills can be invalidated at
any time.

There's definitely a lot of potential innovation that can be done in developer
collaboration and environment setup, but I don't think that a proprietary
system will get the widespread adoption needed to move the industry forward.

------
sitepodmatt
I guess this will compete with
[https://cloud.google.com/debugger/](https://cloud.google.com/debugger/)
eventually (if not already)

------
pooktrain
It would be amazing if this integrated with EKS to easily create remote k8s
clusters for development. I couldn't tell from this press release if that's a
possibility though.

------
fcoury
Did anyone succeed creating a new environment? I tried from CodeStar but
didn't find anything like Cloud9.

------
sdsdsdsdsds
What is the pricing for this? I read the faq
([https://aws.amazon.com/cloud9/faqs/](https://aws.amazon.com/cloud9/faqs/)),
It seems like cost is included in EC2 instances.

~~~
whoisjuan
It's free. You only pay for the computing of the EC2 instance.

------
mark_l_watson
Q: I have tried starting up two IDE sessions - neither was successful. The IDE
window shows a spinning Connecting graphic and never finishes initializing -
waited 20 minutes both times. Cloud9 growing pains?

------
zengid
I'd be interested to see if google responds to this with something for
Firebase and GCE. The browser based editor for Google Apps Script isn't too
bad, so they might be able to expand on that.

------
bdcravens
After a quick check it looks like it’s incompatible with iPad Pro (paired with
a keyboard that would be great if it worked)

~~~
MentallyRetired
The only issue, from my understanding, is the arrow keys not working. Ace
editor just pushed an update that fixes the issue, though it's not yet
integrated into C9.

I use a note 8 with a Dex dock, and I'm kinda dying for full mobile support on
C9.

------
MentallyRetired
I've been using c9.io for about 6 months now as my sole IDE for my own
projects (I'm 100% node/react/etc). It's been fantastic. I really wish they
added some breakpoints and mobile support, because coding on the go isn't
amazing, but I can see the potential.

