Introduction to cloud9

12 March 2023

Let me start with the problem statement. I want to create ephemeral instances for few hours to test things and check if it's working or not. Say, I'm contributing to a opensource project and wanted to run the integration test. For all such purposed, I've started using cloud9 these days and by far I'm very pleased with it.

Things that I like about cloud9 is that it's very stable. With other similar solutions, I start getting warning messages that no CPU left or sometimes the browser doesn't seem to work perfectly.

Now one question you may ask is that why not ssh?

Over my college wifi, I've this problem that I can't ssh into any of the instance and therefore in browser IDEs are something on which I'm relying for developing and testing stuff.
I've tried creating a tunnel but again that comes up a with complexity and it's not that quick.
Other thing whihc I like about cloud9 is that it's fast and the default IDE is also good and comes with sensible defaults. Yes, I do miss the vscode extension but given the benefits and responsivness, I'm happy to take the tradeoff.

After spinning cloud9 here're the things I do

Install fish

sudo yum install fish -y

Installing Arkade

curl -sLS https://get.arkade.dev | sh

Get ready with K8s environment

ark g minikube kubectl kubens
export PATH=$PATH:$HOME/.akrade/bin 
source ~/.bashrc

Create a global mark for fish config In my local system, I've setup F as my mark for fish config which is available at ~/.config/fish/config.fish and in the ephemeral environment I open up the file and use mF to create the marks.

$ vim ~/.config/fish/config.fish
$ mA

Usecases

Compiling Rust Programs I am using a lot of rust based CLI tools these days and often if they release a new feature then I want to try those things by compiling the program and often this is little difficult on my personal system. So, I spin up a cloud9 instance and then compile the program there and then download the artifact from the cloud9 dashboard itself. In the past, I've tried

Things I like

Ah, in the browser you don't have to do anything. For copy and pasting stuffs, you've ctrl+c and ctrl+v I know it sounds not good but it is straightforward so this is good for me.