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Cloud9, a provider of a cloud-based software development environment, published results of a survey of developers using cloud-based tools that found that the majority of them are committed to working in the cloud.
As part of its research into how developers use cloud-based tools, Cloud9 surveyed 1,200 developers that use its platform and found that 64 percent of developers who have switched to a cloud development environment said they will not switch back to a desktop IDE. Developers cited higher productivity and improved team dynamics as advantages of cloud-based development.
Moreover, developers surveyed cited four main benefits of using cloud developer environments that contribute to their productivity increase: access to the same environment anywhere (22 percent), environment management (16 percent) as full stack environments are set up and switched instantly, collaboration (14 percent) on code and instantly sharing a preview result in a major decrease in team friction, and easy prototyping or learning (8 percent).
“Developers become significantly more productive after moving to cloud based developer environments,” said Ruben Daniels, Cloud9‘s CEO, in a statement. “It is incredibly encouraging to see that our research confirms that once developers have made the move to the cloud, they are very likely to keep developing in the cloud. I think it is fair to say that cloud development environments have become mainstream.”
In addition, Cloud9 announced that it has received a new round of venture capital funding from Balderton Capital, a European venture capitalist investor in tech startups. Suranga Chandratillake, a partner at Balderton, will be joining the Cloud9 board of directors, in his first investment since joining Balderton in January 2014. Chandratillake was formerly U.S. CTO at Autonomy, and founded blinkx, the intelligent search engine for video and audio content, in 2004.
As to how Cloud9 will use the investment, Daniels wrote in a blog post: “We know from our research that several communities are profiting immensely from the cloud development benefits on Cloud9. We’ll spend part of our funding into deepening support for frameworks and tools for those communities. We’ll also extend the cloud development benefits to a few new communities, with specific support for their needs. We’re crazy about optimizing the entire IDE experience, from the speed of the environment to how the UI looks and feels, so that will remain our focus for all Cloud9 developers.
“There’s also a huge diversity in the types of languages, platforms and frameworks that are used for development, so we’ll open up Cloud9 to third party developers to build plug-ins that extend Cloud9 in any form imaginable. We’ll release both an SDK and a way to easily distribute free or paid plug-ins to Cloud9. We already have an amazing community that extends and improves our Ace text editor, and we aim to duplicate that with the Cloud9 plug-in system.”
Daniels also said Cloud9 will make it easier for large teams to use the platform and to share resources. The investment also will go to automating developer workflows and improving DevOps support.