AWS Cloud9 – Cloud Developer Environments
aws.amazon.com
aws.amazon.com
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).
I think this feature is called "Workspaces" in Chrome.
I even think this benefits high schoolers and college students. If AWS gives credits to schools who implement Cloud9 in their curriculums, they're going to get a big win here.
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...
Definitely a lesson to everyone to be cognizant of their dependencies.
The pitfalls of dependencies is something a lot of courses tend to ignore completely. Getting bit by dependency issues tends to be a hard-learned lesson, just like this one. Perhaps consider mentioning it in future classes.
I'm also a course creator (but I don't use cloud9). A change like this is a really big deal for someone in his/her shoes. Having to re-record all of those videos is non-trivial, and doing it with the self hosted version would still require new videos to be made.
I feel for them, but it is the risk associated with using any sort of product you don't directly manage yourself.
You can version pin/host/containerize to self host, whatever, along with sharable prebuilt envs.
Curious, can you provide link to youtube where you, I assume, store your videos.
Something like that.
It moves fast, very fast, faster than any other industry on the planet, technology is extremely new, and as such, will change frequently.
We're committed to being open and available to anyone who wants to use the product. We're also very passionate about education and have a product specifically targeted at educators: https://repl.it/classrooms
We're currently not as feature complete IDE as C9 is but the aim is to get there without complicating the product too much. We want to keep it so that under 2 seconds anyone can spin up an environment. We also want to keep it simple and uncluttered. However, we want to expose a lot of the power that we already built the infrastructure for. Big updates to that end coming soon.
I stopped using it when I switched jobs and our proxy was breaking connections to the site, but it looks like it has come a long way since then.
* Instructions on how to do particular tasks in a gui that may change drastically in the next version are of limited and transitory value. Investing heavily in this is probably a poor use of your time.
* Depend on platforms you control. People whose relationship to you is decidedly asymmetrical have little reason to concern themselves with your needs. At minimum a platform ought to be open source and self hosting ought to be a realistic option for you.
* You might want to consider a virtual machine configured with a particular environment as a better way to present learners with a setup environment. While installing virtualbox will take a few extra minutes anyone to whom go to a website, download the installer and click next is too high a bar might have too little invested in the matter.
* Text is a better medium to teach compared to video. Video requires a lot more bandwidth, is less portable especially to anyone who might want to view it offline or in areas with bad or inconsistent connectivity, requires more time to produce, is harder to update, is harder to bookmark, is harder to share, is harder for the learner to refer to later.
Compare cutting and pasting a bit of text into a note, or referring to a bookmark vs finding the exact spot in a video where you mentioned a particular fact.
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.
git clone git://github.com/c9/core.git c9sdk
cd c9sdk
scripts/install-sdk.sh
There is a cloud9 v2[2] alterantive but ide.c9.io just more polished.
[0]: https://github.com/c9/core#installation
[1]: https://github.com/c9/core/blob/master/LICENSE-COMMERCIAL-US...
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).
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/) and saw the terminal, which is fundamental for us.
As I understand, Codenvy didn't “join” the Eclipse Che effort, Eclipse Che started with code that Codenvy extracted from their proprietary product and open sourced, and most of the Che developers were and are Codenvy (now RedHat) employees.
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.
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.
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.
(Fully converted to C9 6 months ago)
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.
Coming from Sublime -> Atom -> VSCode it looks a bit like the older versions of the editors I used in the past.
Does this cloud based part not lead to problems? Like what platforms is this thing running on "in the cloud"?
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). 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.
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!
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.
But sure, if that is your life, or your very strict work life, I guess it can work fine. Would never be able to work for me since I tinker with so much random shit.
Cloud9 isn't the only cloud dev environment out there.
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.
"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.
I use a note 8 with a Dex dock, and I'm kinda dying for full mobile support on C9.