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Great Lambda support, but worth looking for some alternatives.
January 24, 2019

Great Lambda support, but worth looking for some alternatives.

Fedor Paretsky | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with AWS Cloud9

AWS Cloud9 is used by our company to work on smaller projects that can be fully developed and maintained in one IDE. Cloud9 is great for editing and working on Lambda functions, and provides similar comprehensive IDE functionality, but in a purely-online experience. Cloud9 works seamlessly with a variety of frameworks and other languages that we also use for development, like databases, Shell scripts, Python, Node.js, JavaScript, and multiple web frameworks.
  • Great, fast interface - There is a large list of shortcuts that make development on this IDE an experience that can sometimes even compare to something native.
  • Integrated debugging/troubleshooting - AWS Cloud9 has integrated debugging tools that are quite well-designed.
  • Lambda integrations - Cloud9 allows you to instantly run and maintain Lambda functions. It's probably the best IDE for developing on AWS Lambda.
  • Confusing documentation - AWS's documentation remains quite confusing, and the layout of other services/settings that you have to use with Cloud9 can be a bit of a handful.
  • Sometimes slow - As the size of a project increases, the editor gets increasingly slower, and starts slowing down the browser overall.
  • Long setup process - The setup for Cloud9 can be hard and tough, especially since the documentation is quite hard to understand.
  • Positive - Easy to develop AWS Lambda functions and easy to instantly run Lambda functions as well through the Cloud9 environment.
  • Positive - There is really good debugging and support of many tools you would find in a normal native IDE, which makes developing in the browser more easy.
  • Negative - No Java debugger/runner, this is one of the languages that we have to develop in other IDEs, and is a good reason to move away from Cloud9.
Coder provides an exclusively-online experience of Visual Studio Code, including extensions functionality, but is quite slow at times, and doesn't provide good Lambda support. AWS Lambda integrations remain one of the only reasons we stay with Cloud9, besides that, most dev-ops and frameworks are compatible with other online-only editors and IDEs.
Cloud9 provides great integrations and support for existing AWS services (especially AWS Lambda). Besides that, if your company has good dev-ops, it is worth considering that the development environment gets quite slow as the size increases. Like many other cloud computing services, there are good integrations with other cloud services of the company, but beyond that, not really much good integrations support. Cloud9 is a good example of this. The same applies for other cloud computing services - it is worth consolidating to one service to get the best support across cloud products.