Agreed. While conveniences are nice, so much of this cloud tech come at a huge cost. Whenever I see any reduced-feature app I immediately search for an attempt

Agreed. While conveniences are nice, so much of this cloud tech come at a huge cost. Whenever I see any reduced-feature app I immediately search for an attempt at vendor lock-in. Cloud only + required signup... yikes. I used to code RoR & when I moved to Java my mind was blown by how advanced Eclipse's plug-in ecosystem & perspective switching is. (I know I know, you can code RoR in Eclipse...) This looks appealing, and I understand this maybe if it becomes a complete cloud dev/deployment stack for Node & the scripting languages, but outside that I wouldn't trust configurations given by a web-app company that is trying to simplify my coding life. AWS has a learning curve & some lock-in but people delve into that world because there is so much freedom otherwise. Cloud IDE tools are just like working from the file system of a very restricted machine. A big part of software engineering is the edge case, the freedom to use your box to engineer something really unique. Semi-Tangent I may get ripped apart for: When I first started working for a corporation I was a little uneasy about getting into a physical server, Java-based ecosystem. But after observing awhile and realizing a lot of the possibilities that this offers, I'm relieved not to have to live & die so much by the framework culture. I think Netflix is really inspiring to this end. I'll admit I haven't dug through their code repos much but the fact that they open-source things and maintain an interesting tech blog are a testament to the fact that a lot of ingenuity is still happening in the "this is MY stack" world (vs. "we need to rethink our business model to fit a pre-defined stack/framework/toolset"). I used to love Heroku as well, but lately I've been having so many 2nd thoughts. In a world of Machine Images... why trust a company that will upcharge based on "Services" (a lot of which are just pre-configured installations of open source software) rather than charging for straight resource consumption. If it were upto me I'd kindof rather keep a sysadmin on retainer to build some better images, and then maybe open source those. Except I'm sure Amazon is way ahead of me on that.