Amazon's AWS buys Cloud9 to add more development tools to its web services stack
We're excited to let you, our users and customers … Jordan Novet / VentureBeat : AWS acquires collaborative coding company Cloud9 IDE Jonathan Vanian / Fortune : Amazon Just Bought This Hot Cloud Startup Darryl K. Taft / eWeek : AWS Buys Cloud9 to Bolster Cloud Developer Tooling Rachel Nielsen / Silicon Valley Business Journal : Amazon snaps up San Francisco cloud company James Niccolai / PCWorld : AWS buys Cloud9 IDE in snub to Google Stephanie Condon / ZDNet : Amazon's AWS acquires cloud-based IDE startup Cloud9 Dan Richman / GeekWire : Amazon Web Services buys Cloud9, a maker of online development tools Nate Swanner / The Next Web : Amazon buys popular cloud-based IDE Cloud9 for use with AWS Tweets: Joe Pindar / @joepindar : Asked to explain AWS-Cloud9 M&A (http://techcrunch.com/...) so drew a @swardley map.Thks @NeuronMisfiring for feedback http://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the second small capability buy AWS has folded into its stack in little over a year, following the ClusterK acquisition that brought apps-running-at-a-fraction-of-price technology in-house, and it lands just months after the AWS IoT platform launch broadened what kinds of workloads Amazon wants attached to its cloud.
Cloud9 gives AWS a browser-based, collaborative IDE rather than raw infrastructure, and PCWorld's framing of the deal as a snub to Google signals the competitive read: a startup long associated with cloud coding workflows now belongs to AWS. The payoff arrived in late 2017, when AWS relaunched Cloud9 as a packaged collaborative IDE pre-loaded with popular languages.
First-order effects
- Cloud9's existing c9.io users and AWS developers gain a coding environment natively wired into AWS accounts, removing the separate-vendor step between writing code and deploying it on Amazon's cloud.
- Google loses an independent ally in browser-based development tooling, per the competitive framing in the related coverage, while AWS's developer-facing catalog gains a marquee entry point.
Second-order effects
- Microsoft and Google are pushed to answer with their own cloud-hosted development environments, since whoever owns the editor effectively owns the default deploy target for new projects.
- The deal follows the ClusterK template of acquiring teams whose technology deepens lock-in, suggesting more AWS purchases aimed at workflow capture rather than scale.
Third-order effects
- If the ClusterK-then-Cloud9 pattern holds, cloud competition shifts from price-per-compute to who controls the developer's daily workspace — a shift consistent with AWS's later Away Team model, where one team's service gets rebuilt by whichever team needs the enhanced capability.
- Developer tools become an acquisition category in their own right, with independent IDE makers facing a choice between selling to a hyperscaler or being outflanked by free bundled alternatives.
The trend: Hyperscale clouds are absorbing developer-workflow startups so the editor, the pipeline, and the runtime all point back at their own infrastructure.