Developing in the Cloud

I want to move my development environment to the cloud.  My current setup is poor for a lot of reasons. I have a 120 SSD with half the space dedicated to a Windows 7 instance and the other half being taken up by a Windows 8 VHD.  Both are cluttered, and reaching their storage limits.  What I would like to have is a well curated development environment to do C# development for Windows Mobile apps.  Going to the cloud and taking advantage of accessibility and scalability is exactly what i am looking for.

With Citrix I could create my own local cloud but I find Amazon AWS & Azure much more promising.  There are plenty of ways to get your web development into the cloud through online services.  Cloud9ide provides a web development environment.  Cloudshare gives access to a cloud development platform for Beta Microsoft products.

To speed up setup we can use Bitnami for downloading open source stacks that can be hosted in the AWC cloud or on your local PC.  For a fee, Bitnami will host your environment for you, but for gree you can test out the packages for an hour.  I explored a test instance of TestLink for creating test plans, which led me to explore some comparable solutions such as Redmine for Project Management and RTH – Requirements and Testing Hub.

Amazon’s AWS offers a 1 year trial for a micro-instance that has enough computing power, storage, and bandwidth to run a website or web service, making it a great option for testing.  There are options for both Linux and Windows.

What is most encouraging is that people are already moving their development environment to the cloud, and the costs seem to be under control as long as you aren’t careless.