Has anyone used this in a paired environment? Would love to hear feedback on that. I'd also like to know if anyone has tried "importing" an existing rails app into nitrous, and how that has worked.

This is pretty good. But does the free account last forever? Last time i was lured into signing up upcloud.com and was forced to pay a month later or my entire account gets wiped out.

Thanks @DanielKehoe, this is very comprehensive. It's great to see how to do it, but how do you find using it? What's the speed like?

That's the thing, I thought it would be unusable because of network latency. But I'm actually using it and it seems faster than my native environment on a Macbook Air. Fast Comcast broadband in San Francisco's Outer Sunset District but still, how can it be faster than my local shell?

As usual, a very complete writeup by @DanielKehoe. It's interesting to see alternatives to Heroku starting to popup.

Uh, not exactly Heroku. You can launch an app and see it in your browser but just while you are doing development. You'll still need to deploy your application to Heroku or elsewhere for hosting. Nitrous.io is more like Cloud9, someplace to write code. Or maybe you are thinking of the old Heroku Garden which had a browser-based coding environment.

I'm definitely going to try this out for pair programming. looks very interesting.

Yea, let me know how it works for you. It's easy to pair in the text editor. To share the console you'd need tmux or screensharing.