Amazon acquires Cloud9 to deepen cloud development tools portfolio

Amazon buys Cloud9 for cloud-native integrated development environment (IDE)

Amazon has acquired cloud developer startup Cloud9 in a move aimed at bolstering developer tooling options for the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud platform.

Cloud9 provides a development environment for cloud-native applications that supports a number of different programming languages, including common developer choices such as Python, JavaScript with Node.js and Ruby.

The company said that it provides an integrated development environment that allows developers to get started with coding for cloud-based applications immediately and to collaborate with peers. Cloud9 claimed to have built up nearly half a million registered users over the three years or so that it has been operating.

The acquisition was announced by Cloud9, which pledged to continue to work with its open source community and to provide innovative services to developers and the firm's hundreds of thousands of customers worldwide. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed

"We're excited to let you, our users and customers, be among the first to learn that we have been acquired by Amazon. We will be joining the AWS family, and we're looking forward to working together on terrific customer offerings for the future," said Cloud9 founder and chief executive Ruben Daniels.

AWS is by far the world's largest cloud provider, but the firm faces growing competition in the enterprise space from others such as Microsoft's Azure platform. Amazon already has developer tools, but many in the industry regard these to be the firm's weak spot when compared with rivals', and the Cloud9 acquisition looks to improve its capabilities here.

AWS, however, is strong in terms of features and APIs, and has recently begun building up its so-called 'serverless' compute support based on services such as AWS Lambda, where developers can create code that runs on the cloud platform in response to some event or trigger.

The firm previewed a Python Serverless Microframework earlier this week to let developers build applications without having to provision virtual machines.

Amazon had not responded to requests from V3 for comment on the Cloud9 acquisition at the time of writing.