[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).

[bphogan]

People forget the bit about poor performing machines. Developers with tech jobs often have high end machines provided to them. Many students do not, especially at public open-enrollment places. They come with whatever they have, despite recommendations from the program they enter.

[hyperdeficit]

This is also a reason that Cloud9 makes sense for us. The group I work with is focused on teaching programming to people who aren't traditionally represented in software development and sometimes they don't even have their own computers and have had to borrow a computer from a friend to do the work.

With Cloud9 they can develop on any computer they have access to, whether their's, a friend's, or even one at the public library. It is just one less barrier to being able to engage people.

[tedmiston]

^ This is a great point.

I've run into the use case while traveling abroad where I don't have a computer (out of paranoia / lack of security).

Internet cafés are everywhere but setting up the perfect dev environment takes so long... so far it's made development fairly impractical, especially because they're often very old Windows machines. I've had good experiences with C9 so far, though I'd like to see how it pans out under that use case.

[superuser2]

>setting up the perfect dev environment takes so long

It is a Not Unreasonable (TM) time investment to automate setting up your dev environment in the way you would a prod environment. emacs.d and other dotfiles in source control, masterless Puppet or Chef on your laptop, etc. If you're willing to go as far as installing Vagrant manually, the rest can be made pretty easy.

Of course, this works too.

[SomeCallMeTim]

>Developers with tech jobs often have high end machines provided to them.

Developers with tech jobs should also be able to afford high end machines.

It's totally worth it, if your employer will allow you to work on your personal machine at all.

[krisdol]

Those tech companies should also provide high end machines to developers. I'm glad the last two places I've worked provided high end MacBook pros but also allow devs to use their own machines so inevitably there are a couple of Linux and Windows folks.

Interesting that for me it was the startups that provided good machines while the enterprises provided 4 years old lenovo laptops with not so good batteries not the specs needed to use a VM effectively

[vincnetas]

Just got back from paternaty leave and got new MacBook pro. Not sure if got lucky or this will be common practice. I'm from the IBM corporation. So one should not generalize ;) P.S. I guess only people who get crappy HW complain and this creates the ilussion that all corporations give crappy HW.

[SomeCallMeTim]

>enterprises

Yeah, well, I'll just add that to my (very long) list of reasons never to work for enterprise companies.

[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.

[scourge]

>In GitLab we want every issue and every commit to have an IDE button https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/12759 Have you considered nix environments or even containers for that?

[sytse]

Yes, we think this will be great with a container scheduler. The IDE, Review Apps, and Autoscaling CI runners are a great for a container scheduler. We're currently working on making GitLab run great on Mesosphere and RedHat OpenShift, and plan to add others after than.

[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.

[preek]

I'm a lecturer myself and am curious: How do your lecturers deal with the situation that students have at least three different operating systems (LINUX, Mac, Windows)? Setting up a VM will make 2/3rds cringe in my experience - setting up three VMs is a lot of work.

[asayler]

We use VirtualBox in our courses since it's a single platform that runs on all 3 major operating systems. Chromebooks are still an issue, but few enough people have those that we can basically just classify them as unsupported. There's still some setup effort, especially on Windows machines that ship with hardware virtualization disabled at the BIOS level, but it's a much simpler way to get 1000+ students up and running quickly than trying to have everyone setup local dev environments.

We've written about our setup in https://www.andysayler.com/output/pdf/csvm-sigcse14-paper.pd....

The website for our current VM is at http://foundation.cs.colorado.edu/vm/.

[jswny]

I'd say that most students running Linux opt to install their own development environment so installing the VM for them really isn't an issue. Either way, it's much easier for the professor to spend a class showing people how to install VirtualBox, and then the class VM than showing them how to install an entire development environment locally.

Here's how it works: the professor prepares an Ubuntu VM with the entire development environment set up inside it, and then just provides the image link for the VM. The students can easily install VirtualBox, and then all they have to do is download the image and run off that.

[jsgo]

unless I'm misunderstanding the question, I don't think this is going to be an issue.

I have VMs on an external hard drive that are accessible to me via Windows and Ubuntu (fairly sure I've accessed them on my MBP as well, not sure). I'm using VirtualBox, so I set up the initial connectivity stuff, point at the existing vhd, and then I'm running right along by launching the VM.

[snuxoll]

I like the vagrant-ish approach (just, not using Vagrant, shared folders are way finnicky in many different circumstances and it just really defeats the purpose of the tool if you aren't paying extra $$$ for the VMWare provider), personally. May not have been a classroom setting, but when I was training one of our new developers who had 0 Python or Linux experience (we're mostly a .Net shop, wasn't a hiring criteria) I had him install Fedora Server (CLI-only) in a VirtualBox VM. We then used the built-in deployment and remote execution / debug facilities in PyCharm Professional to test code inside a sane environment (because installing psycopg2 on Windows is not sane) while he was able to use his familiar desktop to actually do everything else, after setting deployment up it was pretty much transparent.

Where feasible, I think the "code locally, run remotely" concept works quite well, especially as most IDE's support at worst FTP upload.

[ecesena]

I'd recommend Vagrant or Docker, both multi platform.

[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.

[sbierwagen]

What, you've never sshed into a remote machine?

[beachstartup]

i think this thread is separating the beginners from the veterans.

[softawre]

I think what the GP was talking about is more like RDP for a development environment.

[beachstartup]

yeah sure, vnc. which works fine over the internet.

it even works fine over ssh, over vpn, over the internet, over 3g, in an airplane!

it's turtles all the way down.

[benologist]

The nicest thing about Cloud9 is being open source you can install it on your own hardware so those VMs don't have to be remote.

[nocman]

Unless something has changed since last year, it is not truly "open source" if you're going by the Open Source Initiative's definition of "open source".

Evidently there are a number of restrictions placed on the source code that prevent this from being the case. There was a Reddit discussion about it at the time:

https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/2vvs7i/cloud9_...

[benologist]

It is most definitely open source it is just not unconditional, maybe that will change now.

https://github.com/c9/core

[base]

In my university we have been using remote VMs with a GUI (e.g. Windows) for more than 10 years. We need to this with several softwares due to license restrictions.

[debaserab2]

Every cloud provider is essentially providing a remote vm. Been working great for me for the past 10 years.

[RussianCow]

I think the parent means graphical VM.

[oldmanjay]

Guess that's all a matter of where in the US you are. It's a big country.

[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)

[ivan_burazin]

Congrats to the c9 team, but if you have a chance would love if you would take a look at https://codeanywhere.com

[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.

[cperciva]

Just a hair under $5 a month

IF you run it continuously. hyperdeficit was talking about using VMs for teaching, where VMs would presumably be spun up and down as needed.

[e12e]

Which you can also do at Digital Ocean (note: you have to take a snapshot, and destroy the droplet in order to suspend billing).

While it might be pennies (or less!) - I'm still wary of how Amazon bills everything separately - your data at rest, your CPU, your bandwidth. I don't know if Digital Ocean would be any cheaper - but it sure strikes me as being a lot easier to predict. Maybe I'm just unreasonably afraid of what I perceive as "billing complexity" at Amazon.

Now I'm actually tempted to set up a small classroom using skolelinux/DebianEdu[1] on Digital Ocean built around a central droplet running the servers - and seeing how easy it is to suspend every thing to a dormant state and revive it... mostly just to play with the ldap-stuff.

[1] https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Jessie/Insta...

[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.