
Nitrous Service Shutdown – November 14th - stormbrew
https://community.nitrous.io/posts/nitrous-service-shutdown-november-14th
======
ivan_burazin
As the founder of Codeanywhere a competitor in the Cloud IDE space this event
saddens me. They worked for years trying to change the way people code, but
did not make it in the end.

Contrary to what people may or may not think, they will be missed.

~~~
nowarninglabel
If it's ok to tack on here, how do you convince developers to move to Cloud
IDEs? I've been trying to convince my team, but they are glued to PHPStorm and
thus my attempts to move them meet steady resistance. The value-prop for me
makes sense though, get out of the business of trying to maintain a vm on
everyone's machine. Granted maybe we could solve it in other ways with
containers or such but Cloud9, Codeanywhere, and some of these other tools
seem like the right thing to move to.

~~~
bartread
I'm going to get flack for this, certainly in this discussion, but...
seriously? What is this obsession with cloud IDEs?

The reason you can't convince _me_ is that nobody has ever been able to
explain in clear terms the benefit or the point of using a cloud IDE.

A cloud IDE presupposes excellent uninterrupted connectivity. Guess what? I
often work on the move and often don't have that.

I'll admit that keeping Visual Studio service packed can be tiresome but this
irritation is vastly outweighed by the fact that I can use it on the move.
Likewise Sublime Text, or WebStorm, or whatever. And it's not as if software
updates can't be solved in a different way (Chrome, Firefox).

For me the combination of a locally installed IDE with a distributed version
control system still offers the best value prop for working portably.

I'm not saying a cloud IDE is always a terrible idea but, after 4+ years of
these things, I still don't really get the appeal.

~~~
peterder
As a former volunteer CS instructor (for high school students), the cloud IDEs
were great for use on school owned hardware that got wiped randomly, often had
boot issues, etc.

As long as the students had a working machine, they'd be able to get to their
projects regardless of whether it was on the machine they used the previous
day (without have to deal with git/etc).

In my professional life I would never use these tools.

~~~
baldfat
I use them the same way. I find git as a single developer to be also a much
better fit for me. I work in three different locations on three different
machines and a laptop. Git works for me, but I have taught some and the cloud
IDE is great for teaching.

------
welanes
Nice no-nonsense shutdown post. I kinda miss the nonsense though.

Like why are they shutting down, are they keeping their static-hosting service
Pubstorm, and if so, how - at $5 per month - can that be more economical?

~~~
rainboiboi
I'm not sure if it's worth (economically) maintaining Pubstorm though.

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49531
A couple years ago when I was first learning to code all I could afford was a
cheap chromebook and nitrous enabled me to learn and grow as an engineer with
very little barrier of entry.

I am sad they're shutting down, but more for sentimental reasons, I haven't
used nitrous in over a year and once they dropped their freemium version I
couldn't convince myself to come up with the cash to use them.

------
cocktailpeanuts
What was the value proposition of this (and other services that are still
alive)?

We can already use git to store code in the cloud AND do so only when we want
to. Was it the containerized environment? Even in that case why wouldn't they
provide some sort of "dropbox for coding" type of service instead?

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benologist
I tried Nitrous a few times and thought it was nice, but I kind of feel like
it's the wrong decade to start depending on a proprietary dev tool you can't
host. Being able to install Cloud9 on your own computer was great if you were
xx - xxx ms from a server or offline.

Hopefully their software resurfaces with new opportunities when it's open
sourced.

------
ivan_burazin
As the founder of Codeanywhere a competitor in the Cloud IDE space this event
saddens me. They worked for years trying to change the way people code, but
did not make it in the end.

Contrary to what people may or may not think, they will be missed.

~~~
williamstein
What's left? c9.io what recently bought by Amazon. There's codenvy still,
which is migrating from codenvy.com to codenvy.io for some reason: "The legacy
IDE at codenvy.com will be shut down on Friday, November 4th 2016. This is the
last phase of our 3 phase sunset for the legacy codenvy.com system (details
are below this message). Your account will be automatically migrated to
codenvy.io. You will need to reset your password upon first login in that
system."

~~~
ivan_burazin
We are, codeanywhere.com :)

~~~
williamstein
Yes, got that. But besides you?

~~~
ksajadi
How about Koding? I always thought of Koding to have a similar proposition.

I was looking at their site today and they claim 1,000,000 users on their
website. How many developers are in the world? 11 million or so? So about 9%
of world developers use Koding and somehow I have missed pretty much all of
them.

~~~
ivan_burazin
Hi Khash :) Yeah but they changed focus a while back. Stated they are no no
longer a Cloud IDE.

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rajat1saxena
I've read many comments on this thread regarding usability and value-prop of
online IDEs. Here are some points from a perspective of a developer who was
relying heavily on Nitrous.

1\. I was able to patch my production apps from anywhere.

2\. I was able to deploy my apps, in-case my hosting service provider decided
to reboot the servers while I was at home, away from my development machines.

3\. I was able to build new features, on alternate git branches, while
enjoying at home with my family.

4\. I was able to host new features, from a development branch, and let my
colleagues provide real-time feedback.

I am one of the developers who will be crippled if online IDEs like Nitrous go
away.

~~~
VLM
I do that all now with a mixture of rdesktop/rdp and SSH and occasionally
Emacs tramp mode over a VPN.

Basically if I have my local emacs I can use it even when the dev, test and
prod servers are 1000 miles away, and if I don't have my emacs (on my tablet
or something) then its rdesktop/rdp and run my IDE remotely.

My current employer is pretty chill with all my machines being 1000 miles away
in a corporate national data center, but is not chill with the idea that some
3rd party will host the critical development path and connectivity could
disappear at their whim.

Its the classic "cost too low" problem for PaaS. My code, no matter how
important it is to me or my employer, cannot be worth more than $39/mo to
Nitrous in some kind of worst case scenario. Actually its only worth their
cost of sales to replace me, which might be higher or lower, but certainly
isn't a lot of money. On the other hand my management team can escalate a
locally hosted problem such that a big enough problem might in theory cost
multiple sysadmins their job, maybe their boss too, lets say a max of $500K/yr
if multiple people got fired for over the top gross misconduct. That means my
boss has AT LEAST a thousand times more leverage in case of problems with self
hosted vs PaaS. There's a big difference between "eh $40 here, $40 there, who
cares about that trouble ticket" and "our shared veep said you'd fix ticket
#24153 before going home today or you're unemployed". "I don't care if your
total budget is $10M/yr or a thousand people are sitting down waiting until
its fixed, you're only worth $40/mo to me and not a penny more, tough luck".

I mean, seriously, 14 days warning? I've taken longer than two week vacations.
Imagine coming back from a long vacation and trying to log in to get some work
done and finding out everything was wiped a week ago, LOL.

------
garganzol
TechCruch piece on this [https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/31/cloud-development-
platform...](https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/31/cloud-development-platform-
nitrous-io-shuts-down/)

I would add: don't trust anything you can't reproduce on your air-gapped
machine.

------
rezashirazian
I always thought Nitrous had more potential as an educational platform as
opposed to a remote/cloud based development environment.

It's a shame to see this, they had some cool stuff.

~~~
chris_st
Their email about this says they're open sourcing some of it... we'll have to
wait and see what, exactly, that is.

------
roberdam
I have been a daily user of nitrous since February 2014, the news hurts like a
punch in the stomach, thanks to them I started programming again after a 15
year break. It feels as if a dear friend and office mate was diagnosed with 15
days of life. Such a bummer, Hope the best for the team.

------
DanielKehoe
I recommended Nitrous in my book 'Learn Ruby on Rails.' The service is ideal
for beginners who have difficulty installing Rails on their local machines.
It's a useful service but I presume they don't make money with the
beginner/educational market. It didn't help that they dropped their free tier
snd then brought it back months later. Sorry to see them go.

~~~
bphogan
I moved everything to c9.io for my Rails book and workshop for the same
reason.

------
chrismbeckett
I coded in the cloud full-time for over two years and loved it. I switched
back and forth between Cloud9 and Nitrous based on plan changes and new
features. The primary reason I switched back to local was for better Cordova
debugging and Electron. For web development, it was really nice.

~~~
bhollan
I'm exploring Electron already, so out of curiousity, what did you build with
Electron? Any recommendations of a good "starter" app/tutorial/walkthrough?

------
orbitingpluto
I've been happily using the nitrous.io service for 2 months to play around
with Meteor. It is a great service. I quickly defaulted to the shell with tmux
rather than using the IDE. Hosting was only $19/month which hit the sweet spot
between shared hosting and a VPS.

Shared hosting for Meteor is not an option as a 'meteor update' always runs
out of memory and gets killed for using too many resources. You can upload a
config, but this is unwieldy and is antithetical to the whole point of Meteor.

------
tekromancr
That's really sad. I really liked nitrous, and am still a really big fan of
the "hack" button for projects.

------
znpy
I am excited by the possibility to host your own Nitrous instance.

I don't know about their backend stack, but imho this is the kind of project
that could/should go under the umbrella of the Apache Foundation.

It could be a serious competitor to web-base version of Eclipse.

------
JamesDrummond
Let me start by stating I am the release manager for Codenvy and Che. When
trying to decide if a cloud IDE is right for you like so many things in life
"It depends". A local IDE probably works "fine" for most single developers or
small teams. Developers that have been using a certain local IDE may find that
it is better to stick with it than to invest time in learning about and how to
use a cloud IDE. Also certain program development can only be done with
specific local IDE software. Codenvy is trying to fit into as many developer
needs as we can but we know we will not always be right for everyone.

However, Codenvy and Che does have advantages over local IDEs. The biggest in
my opinion is having a consistent programming environment that can be
distributed quickly. We leverage the use of Docker in creating workspaces that
run machine(s) which are Docker containers. Source code, compilers, debuggers
and executables are all "contained" in the same runtime environment. This
means consistency in compiling, executing and debugging. When a developer
get's something to work successfully others will be able to do the same
consistently. Also, transitioning from development environment to production
in most cases is more consistent and faster if your production environment
uses or can use Docker containers in production. Running the IDE on a
dedicated server also can increase compile performance and reduce local
machine hardware requirements.

One special advantage that Che and Codenvy over traditional IDE's is some
embedded systems. A developer could include a built-in IDE in their embedded
system. When the embedded system is connected to a network the developer could
use Codenvy or Che to directly reprogram the device using the device's
ipaddress and a web browser. Downside to having the IDE on the embedded system
though is processing power but could work in some cases. Alternatively, a
cross compile development environment could be setup with Che and Codenvy that
could upload the binary/assembly to the embedded device after compiling. This
is actually what we are doing Samsung's Artik development board with the Artik
IDE.

On the topic of leaving a developer "high and dry" if the product fails, is
why open source is a good idea for an IDE. Open sourcing Che, which Codenvy is
built on, ensures that the product has the ability to live on without us if
for some reason Codenvy fails. Not only is Che open sourced but is part of the
Eclipse foundation.

This is a great topic and glad to see all the interest. It's good to see what
developers feel about and want from cloud IDE's.

------
tylerlh
Sorry to hear this. I always thought Nitrous had a pretty nice platform
compared to other cloud IDEs and Peter is a great guy that was building some
cool stuff. Wishing the folks at Nitrous all the best in whatever comes next.

------
max0563
Well, this is sad. I miss the old Nitrous.io. The new updates they rolled out
suck, and now that they are completely shutting down the service I'm just even
more disappointed. Back to PythonAnywhere I suppose?

~~~
gpjt
PythonAnywhere dev here -- we'd be very happy to have you back! (Especially if
you tell us what made Nitrous a better platform while they were still
operating.)

------
amelius
Another reminder to not let your business depend on the cloud :/

------
dopeboy
We trialed Nitrous with our kids at ScriptEd (after school coding non-profit)
a couple years ago. Their free tier was leaps and bounds above Cloud9. Sad to
see them go.

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ryhamz
I'll admit I haven't seen the editor since summer '14, but it was honestly
shit then.

The only thing I saw it used for was abstracting away environment setup for
kids at a high school coding bootcamp, which I can forgive because it was only
like 10 days. I'd be suspicious of anyone using something similar
professionally. 1 day of environment setup is nothing in the context of a
professional project.

The editor didn't even indent for me properly.

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newsat13
Will they be providing PRs to reomve all the nitrous button links in so many
open source projects?

