I'm a c9.io user so my account is still free, but the impression I get from the Amazon acquisition is that you have to run it on an EC2 instance now. That requires some form of setup, doesn't it? And AWS is jargon all the way down, so the entry level is a lot higher than it was before.

Cloud9 is better than other AWS products in that you can click through one wizard that sets up your EC2 instance and provisions the Cloud9 software on it at the same time. The AWS interface is still a byzantine nightmare of a labyrinth, but just getting into Cloud9 can be saved with a bookmark once it's set up, and setting it up is just one wizard.

Agreed that it's a higher barrier of entry compared to how simple and slick the c9.io interface was.

> The AWS interface is still a byzantine nightmare of a labyrinth

I've heard this enough times to know that it's widely agreed upon, but I've never understood it personally.

Given the absolutely massive and technical amount of features that aws requires, it's not surprising (or even worthy of condemnation) that the interface can get somewhat convoluted. That said, I wonder if there is a stripped down version of that interface that would better accommodate a hypothetical cohort of extremely common use cases. I would bet there isnt, which is why the interface is so.... Deep.

There's a way to pin sections to the nav bar. So you can pin EC2, IAM, RDS, and VPC up there if you mainly use those 4 services.

It's a bit of a nightmare, as a support engineer, to get access requests for AWS services you've never heard of before. "Need access to AWS services: Cloud9, Memento, Athena, and Pandora Nexus." Each having a completely unique set of granular permissions to fumble over means most users get full permissions to the requested service until the auditors complain.

Not exactly what you describe but Amazon does have Lightsail for this purpose.

https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/

Administrators beware - this auto-set up creates wide open security groups and other misconfigurations. Some of these will show up on your Trusted Advisor report.

Yes, but the setup is a few clicks.

I think the main selling point is that you run the IDE on an EC2 which runs the same OS as your production environment (even Lambda) which allows you to directly compile server code in the IDE and it just works on your server.

This sounds suspiciously like editing live PHP scripts in an FTP client.

No you have two machines. Cloud9 EC2 and server EC2 or Lambda

One of Amazon's innovations in the virtual server space is finding new and different ways to repackage their EC2 servers.

I think it's a justifiable reaction, similar to the one after Microsoft's acquisition of GitHub. When an 800 pounds gorilla pays a bunch of cash to acquire a successful independent product, they do so either to quench a potential rival or to embrace and extend into that field and leverage their traditional offering. It makes sense from a business perspective, and they are the only ones capable of paying that much cash precisely because they can use the leverage.

For example, I myself wouldn't touch any service from Amazon with a ten foot pole. I acknowledge their role in starting the cloud revolution, but every business move of that company down to the design of the last web button is to set itself up as a monopoly in the fields it enters. They are the Apple of everything.

Genuinly curious: is there a (relatively cheap) cloud vendor that doesn't do that? MS & G seem pretty similar to me...

The interests of platform vendors and developers are not aligned.

Developers want their skills to be portable, in order to maximize the market for their labor. Platform vendors want you to stick with their offerings in order to maximize the value of the platform.

Even so, vendors can choose how high to dial up the pain they inflict on developers who dare to wander. Trying to develop websites that worked across multiple browsers a decade ago was incredibly painful because of Microsoft dragging its feet on standards compliance for IE. It was so bad that many developers from that era will bear a grudge towards Microsoft for the rest of their lives.

I always laugh bitterly when I hear from a vendor about how much they care about developers. If you really cared about developers you wouldn't make our lives so damn difficult. A huge chunk of my life has been lost to switching costs.

Probably the best remedy is to use developer-governed FOSS platforms whenever possible. The perverse incentives towards lockin don't go away entirely, but they are much less.

Digital Ocean is a traditional VPS provider who recently added a product that competes with AWS S3 and a product that is docker hosting as a service, which I hope is a valid alternative to EC2 autoscaling. They have a thing with gitlab to run your continuous integration pipeline. They have a few more things.

Heroku is a platform as a service. They provide an alternative to EC2 autoscaling. Also available is postgre, Kafka, redis, MongoDB, MySQL, and a few other things I rudely assumed aren't important enough to mention as a service.

Vultr and linode also offer block storage in addition to traditional VPSs.

Ovh has something called object storage.

Auth0 is willing to be your "user authentication as a service" which also includes something like AWS lambda.

Spotinst will help you get cheap "spot instances" for AWS/GCP/Azure. They also have an AWS lambda competitor and an object storage (I think this one is literally a JSON object storage for your FaaS, not actual files). Not much of a primary service provider.

I consider AWS, GCP, and Azure to be megacorporate monopolies and would prefer to support an underdog. But I'm not aware of any 4rth competitor that comes close to what those 3 actually are. The ones I mentioned probably average at 10% and maybe DO or heroku peaks at 40%.

I would love to hear more about cloud providers who are becoming more than just VPSs to take on AWS.

It is sort of available but the writing is on the wall.

They haven't updated any of the ubuntu images since 14.04, and you cannot update them yourself.

They really want you to move to Amazon's pay as you go scheme instead of one flat rate. (I think).

Right, I don't think anyone would recommend using Cloud9 as in c9.io, but AWS Cloud9 (https://aws.amazon.com/cloud9/) is still a perfectly valid option and does get updates.

For my usage, AWS Cloud9 has turned out far cheaper since the EC2 instance shuts down when I'm not using it. I can actually keep it within the free tier, which is a long way from $20/mo I was paying before.

But if you have anything on there that you want to keep, doesn’t it charge you something?

I would think the lowest grade machine is the equivalent of $5/Mo.

In cloud9 I like to have a node machine, a python machine, a rails machine and one to experiment on the front end, one for Data science. Basically I want to muck about on a clean machine.