Nitrous.io Targets Enterprises with Pro Version of Cloud Development Platform | Hacker News Reader

Nitrous.io Targets Enterprises with Pro Version of Cloud Development Platform

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62 pointssnowmaker20 comments

I speak only for myself, but my 'dev' environment more or less amounts to the operating system in its entirety, with access to programs like image viewers, vector graphics editing (i.e. making websites). I still find gnome useful for manipulating files from time to time. I wonder if the future of these ready-to-go development environments will be more like full-featured operating systems (Paperspace) that offer a whole machine in the cloud? Of course this would be a niche case but Google already has CitC images of Gubuntu that they use to avoid similar onboarding setups.

Nitrious is the great solution to work with unix box, using it for months now and it really hides the pain of managing and setting the environment for Rails app development. The built-in IDE works great too, though would like to see some more tools like refactoring but anyway I like that all it requires is the browser so can work basically from any computer.

Yes, sounds like the advertisement but I am comparing to literally days spent on setting up the environment for Rails development on Windows and Ubuntu and my experience with Nitrious where it was like just minutes to get up and running.

Surface-level, this seems awesome, but I wonder how it works for larger companies with more complex (read: messier) environments.

At Nitrous, we use Nitrous Pro to develop Nitrous Pro, and Nitrous Pro requires a pretty complex setup (minimum 10+ components required to run).

We did it by creating a master Docker image that runs Docker in Docker, with sub-containers running individual components. Nitrous Pro allows you to create development environments in the cloud with Docker images, and with the master image we created, we are able to recreate a dev env and onboard a new employee in only 10+ minutes in Nitrous Pro.

I won't say that creating this master image was a trivial task, but we provide many ready-to-go templates that are sufficient for most people to get started, and we are actively looking for ways to make customization of templates easier.

At this point I would have just eliminated the IDE from my toolchain and used continuous integration and continuous delivery. That setup sounds obscenely complicated.

Hi, I have been a long time Nitrous user (I use it with my Chromebook). Do you have any plans for migrating current users to Nitrous Pro?

Thanks

There's a free plan on Nitrous Pro, so you can signup to reserve your free workspace (we're rolling out free workspaces, if you pay it's available immediately). We wrote about a few ways you can migrate your data to Nitrous pro here:

http://docs.nitrous.io/v1.0/docs/migrate-your-data-to-the-ne...

Thanks very much!

Unfortunately Nitrous.io does not work in China, neither does any other web based IDE that I know about. While it's true that it's a tough sell for Chinese companies, there are a lot of foreign companies here doing development.

Outside of java is there even really any money to be made in development tools, always seemed like a sector where the open source free stuff is better than the commercial stuff (besides a few small niches of course).

"Outside of java ..."

Surprised by this given a Spring, Eclipse, Maven, Jenkins, et al setup I would think Java dev tools is a tough one to make any inroads.

I don't understand the basic premise that a development environment takes hours to setup. You must have production deployment automated, and you should have pre-production and testing environment deployments automated too. If so, building a dev install is minutes, not hours; never ever a day of work.

There are a ton of additional benefits of being in the cloud. You can backup your environment and replicate it in minutes, you can collaborate with other developers across the world really easily in real-time, and you can work from any device with a modern web browser. A lot of clients really prefer using Nitrous environments for their service providers because they feel as though they have more control over the developers they're hiring and their IP -- clearly there are still risks since there are fairly easy ways to pull code down but "owning" the machine that your contractors are working on is a step in the right direction for compliance and audit purposes.

We’ve found the biggest benefits are really around the collaborative use cases — sharing environments easily and working together remotely. It’s saved us a ton of time when we’re troubleshooting issues. Yes, you can use tmux over SSH, but not everyone wants to setup and maintain their own development server. I think that interacting with your environment using Nitrous Pro is a really enjoyable experience.

That said, we’ve still got a lot of work to do, so we really do appreciate all the feedback and support from the HN crowd.

> We’ve found the biggest benefits are really around the collaborative use cases

That's an acceptable selling point. Pull it to the front and center on the site. Do not just mention that it's better for collaboration, demonstrate it. Right now, copy on the site is centered on ease of setup which, to me, is a poor feature to justify ceding control of dev workstations.

This depends on both the development environment you're setting up and the skill level.

If you're not familiar with the OS' terminal, dependencies or installers then those are just additional barriers to getting down to programming. With a prepared development environment for say Rails or Meteor you can get started very quickly learning to develop with these frameworks.

For some development environments it was previously a pain on Windows, while this has changed for Meteor it's still not as friendly for Rails. If you can offload those problems to a hosted environment that's a big win.

On Windows, setting up a dev environment can often be a pain in the ass, so if you're locked in for wtv reason I can see the pain point they're trying to alleviate.

Even then though, with things like chocolatey nuget[1] and cmdr [2], windows is heading towards parity.

[1] https://chocolatey.org/ [2] http://gooseberrycreative.com/cmder/

Visual Studio Monaco is really the competitor to a product like this. It's a browser based version of Visual Studio that can be tied into other cloud services.

cmdr looks cool, but how does it compare to using cygwin through mintty?

Next time I reinstall Windows, I think I'll try out chocolatey to see if I can get the `brew cask` experience out of Windows.

cmder was my gateway drug to moving from windows to linux and from gui to ~50% cli use. Cygwin didn't produce quite the same effect.

Also, cmder is gorgeous :)

Yeah, I don't get this either. We work on fairly complex stuff and yet it takes maybe only a hour to set it all up.

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