Does anyone use these in a running production system? What was your experience like? My only previous experiences were being forced to use Salesforce's god awful tools
Something about giving someone else control of my development environment just feels... wrong.
I have an older Chromebook with a really nice screen that weighs about half as much as my other laptops. I spent quite a bit of time trying to get a local development environment setup, but there was always some issue that made it awkward. The local storage was too small, using an SD card was too slow, etc... I also tried using it as a dumb terminal by SSH'ing into a box, but I like having and IDE, and managing a box is fine but more work. Cloud9 provides an okay-ish IDE, but it also manages the EC2 instance, which is really nice.
Another benefit, is that I generally try to avoid working on side projects from my work computer. But I spend the vast majority of time on my work laptop, including casual web browsing. So if I am on my work laptop, and I come up with an idea, or want to test something out, I can just pop open a browser. I don't have to worry that I will accidentally leave files related to the side project on my work laptop, etc..
But just to be clear, I have no interest in using Cloud9 as a replacement for my day to day work. I agree with you, there are too many tools, environments, libraries, etc... that I use day to day that would be nearly impossible to replicate in a cloud environment.
You'll have full REPLs, full filesystems, full plugin capability, etc. etc.
I can't imagine there will be much difference other than needing an internet connection.
These experiences just remote access to it. You still get a command prompt, you can still apt install, and it means the dev env can match prod (eg Debian) vs mismatches if you’re on OSX for example. Also allows the base machine config (tools, scripts, etc) to be curated and centralized.
Gitpod and GitHub Codespaces are great.
I actually think on machine development for non-mobile experiences will be uncommon in a couple years.
This in my mind is the biggest reason to go this way over alternatives.
Also it has broken workflows. They push functions back to Lambda unzipped, so if you're working there and you hit the unzipped limit, there's nothing you can do to push. It will just fail to push back. It's so stupid. You can actually download the inflated function projects but you can't push back after a change. It annoys me so much.
GitLab recently integrated Gitpod natively and that looks pretty solid! It's based on Visual Studio Code + K8s: https://www.gitpod.io/
Eventually I found code-server and now I run that in disposable containers on my home server. It's based on vscode and has been working pretty well for me.
I wonder who the main users are. Schools certainly make sense with the notoriously locked down computers.
There appears to be more free competitors now, so I'm curious what we'd use today. Eclipse Theia looks like VSCode, so that'd probably the most appealing to a lot of teams like mine. Eclipse Che/Codeenvy looks like the most popular. There's a lot more low-key options for sure. Has anyone tried Github Codespaces?
It's good because that way I can work on web stuff on a similar environment than prod, I get all the linux goodies that come handy when developing backend programs, and I can work anywhere from a cheap netbook by tethering my phone data in the bus, with only a terminal console.
So far it work really well.
The whole AWS integration is prett awesome, but compared to VSCode it feels a bit old school.
I tried running code-server on it and it gave me the best of both worlds, but the integration feld a bit clunky. But on the other hand I didn't put much work into refining it.
I am not too familiar with this space.
