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.