Introducing AWS Cloud9

There are many industry-leading code editors, such as IntelliJ, Eclipse, and Visual Studio. Although developers can use any of these editors in their projects, taking a closer look at the AWS Cloud9 editor that AWS offers is worthwhile. It's crucial to understand what additional value Cloud9 offers compared to the other editors. When using editors like IntelliJ and Eclipse, the developers must manually install the software on their local machine. So, the software’s performance relies on the machine’s hardware.

The value proposition of AWS Cloud9

The main benefit of AWS Cloud9 is that the editor will not use resources like CPU, hard disk space, and memory in the local machine. Let’s see how it works. It provides the underlying software and packages required for some commonly used programming languages like Python, Ruby, Go, PHP, and JavaScript. AWS Cloud9 also comes with a pre-installed and pre-authenticated AWS CLI. So, downloading and configuring the development environment is no longer necessary. With Cloud9, the development teams will be up and running in no time.

To launch the IDE provided by AWS, launch the AWS management console and select Cloud9 from the list of services. AWS Cloud9 is a cloud IDE used to develop and debug the code. The first step is to create an environment where AWS will provide the required hardware for the editor.

To work with Cloud9, the project teams must manually provision the infrastructure. The reason is that AWS will have no clue about our development requirements. It's highly recommended to start with a smaller resource like t2.micro and enhance it as our requirement changes. Once the infrastructure is provisioned, AWS monitors the provisioned servers consistently. If it's not used for more than 30 minutes, the servers are put in sleep mode, saving our infrastructure costs.

AWS Cloud9 features

The features of AWS Cloud9 are as follows:

• Code completion: Like IntelliJ and Eclipse, AWS Cloud9 offers context-based code suggestions and code completion features that will help develop faster and bug-free software.

• Debugger: AWS Cloud9 offers core debugging features like setting up breakpoints, step into, step over, iterating over and around the code, inspecting values of specific variables, and writing dynamic expressions to validate values.

• Resizing the underlying infrastructure: As developers need more processing power to handle complex projects, the underlying infrastructure’s capacity of AWS Cloud9 can be changed, making the IDE more powerful.

• Build serverless applications quickly: AWS Cloud9 is prepackaged with libraries, tools, and SDKs for serverless application development. It also supports serverless application model templates.

• Collaboration: The development environment in AWS Cloud9 can be shared with fellow developers for effective collaboration and communication.

Creating an IAM user to launch AWS Cloud9

When someone logs in to their AWS console using their root ID and password and creates a Cloud9 environment, they will be prompted to use an IAM user for this purpose. AWS mandates this for security reasons. In our local instance, we launched IAM, created a new user, and assigned this user a default password. We didn’t set up MFA for this user. But in a real-life scenario, it’s advisable to enable MFA authentication. Creating separate groups and assigning users to the respective groups is not bad if the project team has many developers and testers. Creating groups also makes the life of an administrator easier because they no longer need to maintain privileges at the user level. An administrator can control the privileges at the group level. As a new developer joins the team, they can add or remove them from the group.

We have selected the user and switched to the security credential tab. It lists the console sign-in link this user will use to log in to this account. A system administrator setting up this user might need to send the developers this URL and the temporary password they created.