[hyperdeficit]

I really hope that the Cloud9 service keeps running, and maintains the free version that it currently provides. I have been using Cloud9 with the Michael Hartl Rails Tutorial to teach new programmers the basics of programming with Ruby and Rails and it has greatly reduced the friction for them to start learning.

In previous classes we had the students setup a Ruby and Rails environment on their own systems and not only did that take multiple sessions to get setup, but then we were dealing with environment differences that took the focus away from the basics of learning Ruby nearly every session.

[mhartl]

Cloud9 has been a great partner to the Rails Tutorial, with their custom Rails Tutorial workspace allowing readers to spin up quickly at the beginning, while also maintaining state if they need to take a break. It's also enormously less overhead that downloading and installing a virtual machine.

There's no telling what this acquisition will bring, of course, but it's a good fit for AWS, so I'm optimistic that the service will continue uninterrupted. (Both the 3rd and 4th edition Rails Tutorial screencasts use Cloud9, so I sure hope so!)

Congratulations to Ruben and the rest of the Cloud9 team!

[kevindong]

I just wanted to thank you for making the Rails Tutorial. It was incredibly useful for learning Rails!

[mhartl]

Argh. Too late to edit, but: that downloading -> than downloading

[jozan]

Wouldn't virtual machine basically do the same thing? I've taken some classes where teacher gave us an image where everything was already installed and configured. Everything went smoothly.

However, Cloud9 is much more convenient since it runs entirely on browser but VM solution could work in case C9 discontinues its free tier.

[superuser2]

>I've taken some classes where teacher gave us an image where everything was already installed and configured.

My department tries this occasionally. It fails because students either have

a) cheap pieces of shit with unreasonably poor performance under virtualization (I'm talking multiple seconds to bring a different window to foreground under Ubuntu)

b) Retina MBPs, on which Linux has absolute garbage text rendering due to quarter-assed (half-assed is giving it too much credit) per-application support for high-DPI displays. Staring at code for hours is hard enough when the code isn't blurry.

The department runs a Linux lab in one of the libraries with professionally maintained Ubuntu installs that already have everything professors request for their courses, and provides SSH access to those machines.

An interesting side effect is that you either get good at configuring your environment for yourself (to use your own Mac or Linux machine) or you learn to work with just a terminal (use Emacs/Vim and Bash over SSH).

[sytse]

I think that the future is having not one but many workspaces. If you review a MR? Start that workspace. Help someone with a question? Login to their workspace. In GitLab we want every issue and every commit to have an IDE button https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/12759

BTW congrats to the Cloud9 team. They made a great product and selling to Amazon will ensure it lives on.

[ukyrgf]

Creating a C9 environment takes just a few seconds and once that's done I can work anywhere. It takes all of that setup away. I can create one at work to screw around with a Node module, go home and play with it more on my desktop, move to the couch and use my Macbook, go on the porch to smoke a cigarette and use my Chromebook... the only overhead is a browser tab.

[jswny]

Agreed. In a lot of my college courses, the professors provide a VM which is completely set up for development. That means that anyone who just wants to start programming can use the VM while everyone else who wants to setup their local environment can do that. I think it's a great solution.

[tajen]

A VM could be an alternative, but Cloud9 has a really cool IDE, for what I've seen.

[Secretmapper]

I had the same use case as OP. Cloud 9 was an awesome way to start out, but we indeed switched to a VM solution.

With students that had less than performant laptops, C9 filled the gap.

[fragsworth]

One of these days we'll have fast enough Internet speeds in the U.S. that remote VMs will work (nicely). We're definitely not there yet.

[espadrine]

It could also be a boon for developing open-source software that requires complex dependencies and significant resources.

In that line, https://janitor.technology/, which relies on Cloud9, is a promising offering.

(Disclaimer, I consider the author a friend.)

[newmanships]

If they don't check out https://www.nitrous.io/ - Similar to Cloud9 and was huge for me when I started learning.

[junker101]

Also worth a look depending on your needs: https://codenvy.com/ (based on open source eclipse che IDE) http://www.koding.com/ (easy hybrid local IDE and/or cloud IDE integration)

[RileyCR]

Sure it's "FREE" - becasue every time you use it, you will be consuming compute from your AWS account. That is my thought. AWS would not do this if it did not make them money. It is not just to be cool.

[cperciva]

the free version

EC2's t2.nano, at 0.6 cents per hour, is incredibly close to free. (And that's not even counting the 12 month 'free tier'.)

[Karunamon]

Just a hair under $5 a month, but unless you have a reason to deal with AWS complexity, you're probably better off with something like Digitalocean or Vultr for the same price and less surprises.

[btgeekboy]

It's also only 512MB of RAM. For a dev box, m4.large spot instances work really well price-wise too, especially if you stop them when you're not working.

[z3t4]

I think you should learn how to install a program and even compile a program before you make one yourself. If you learn these basic skills it will be easy to take up any programming language.

[projectramo]

Although it is hard to use for data science because you can't just display graphs.

They claim to have workarounds which never worked for me.