Cloud Development Reccomendations

Happy Friday all.

Anyone here work on a hosted/cloud development platform?
I would like to setup a cloud development environment (I guess I really just need a hosted Linux env) i can SSH into.

I have a Cloud 9 account which works for now, but it can be a little slow/cumbersome and I would like to set up something a little more robust so I was thinking the SSH/VIM/TMUX approach would be better and a great way
to learn with the VIM?TMUX trails here on Upcase.

Anyone develop this way and have any reccomendations, or does everyone else pretty much work locally?

Thanks,
Ryan

Hey Ryan,

I was using a setup like that at a previous company. I found that performance and availability became an issue and now I’m working locally.

It came down to the parameters above compared to always losing some state when you switch environment. The issues of switching haven’t been a big deal to me personally (I haven’t felt the need to bash) and so I chose local.

Out of curiosity: what’s your view on hosted/cloud as compared to local?

I use www.linode.com.
I’ve been using it for probably 5 years now.
You build your server however you want to build it.
You can even create your server via a virtual box .iso file and create your VPS from your virtual box file.
It’s efficient, affordable and very well supported.

I mirror all the tools I have on my local machine (tmux/vim/rvm/nvm/git) on my VPS and I have complete control.
Just make sure you know how to secure your VPS.

It’s a lot of work but you learn a hell of a lot doing it your way.

Thanks for the responses all.

Niclas, I would prefer local but I can also mess around on some personal projects while I am at my day job (non development - more IT/networking - boss is OK with this too don’t worry) but I am on a windows machine. At home I use a mac. I felt like a cloud environment might work well instead of switching back and forth between dev environments.

Joe, thanks for the recommendation I am going to check out Linode. Sounds like I will learn a lot setting up an environment/securing my server.

Thanks,
Ryan

There is another option called Nitrous. As far as I know, you can start and manage development environments in the cloud.

However it seems they provide you the instances with the pre-defined setups for Rails, Python, Node, and so on.

I guess it won’t hurt to try.

I’ll second using a virtual machine hosted somewhere like linode.

For a while, I kept an instance running on DigitalOcean for development. It was nice that I could reach it everywhere but I realized that I could have essentially the same service hosted on my laptop without the subscription fee. I switched to using VirtualBox and installed a Linux VM for development on my local machine. So far, it’s been great!