nithayakumar

Nish from Nimbus here

I was just typing up a response but can't be more succinct than this :)

Nish from Nimbus here.

Personally, I dont think this is going to be a space where one company "wins the market". Whats best for developers is having flexibility and choosing the right tool for what their building and their team. So I'm hoping that these products become/stay more open and let people pick them up and drop them as needed.

On the differentiation front.. there's some common differentiation points, but to your point there's going to be someone doing things like you when theres more and more competitors.

Also - brilliant job with Codenvy! You're one of the pioneers in the field. When we started Nimbus we did our research (even talking to the folks at Koding, NitrousIDE, etc)

Answered in the parent comment! But high level - we aim to be more like local development and flexible.

Yes! I think the problem is that it looks simple to build. But once you get in the weeds - its not so easy to manage performance, flexibility and stability :)

Nimbus is more like local development, we're building for teams that use a wide set of IDEs. Think of us as a "machine first" cloud environment instead of "repo first". So its like having a laptop in the cloud for every project.

Our differences means we've prioritized local editor integrations, use a full EC2 machine dedicated to each user, aim to be more flexible (e.g. you can schedule when your machines are active), and provide more power (right now up to 8vcpu 32gb ram, but customizable by us).

Codespaces, Gitpod and the like are repo first and provide containers instead of VMs. Codespaces doesnt support non-VS Code Users. Gitpod tops off at 8gb or 12gb of ram. We also decided not to go the browser based IDE path that Stackblitz took because the engineers we talked to really didnt want a new IDE.

Hope that helps!

Edit: Want to clarify that I'm Nish from Nimbus

As a founder in a competing company and someone that works from different devices and coffee shops, I'm very pumped for this!

The thing that people underestimate how incredibly freeing it is to work from any device and not have to worry about the setup.

Also hoping that Microsoft educates the market and the typical vendor lock-in bullshit pushes everyone to us

I'm surprised at how bad automated closed captioning (and NLP) is. I prefer reading to hearing and it pains me to use the functionality at times.

Serving VC pitch decks doesn't mean they want want hypergrowth + exits. Having just gone through the W22 batch - it really doesn't feel like they encourage growing quickly and exiting.

Hypergrowth is often what founders want. It's validation of product market fit (and of all the efforts).

Have you considered cloud machines for software dev?

Full disclosure: I'm a co-founder in a business that provides cloud environments for software dev.

One of my cofounders used to code daily from his ipad. I switch between my gaming pc and my mac. The flexibility and peace of mind is unbeatable for me. Plus its great for intensive computing usage since you can scale up and down.

That said, if Linux is your general purpose OS of choice (in addition to programming), than I completely get it :)

Looks like it with some packaging changes: http://web.archive.org/web/20220406172505/https://ngrok.com/...

Linux is great for a ton of use cases - like programming - because its common and theirs social support but not the case for so many other general purpose uses. Not being able to have a 15 year old on youtube explain how to fix a problem really holds me back from switching.