I Loved Cloud9 and Kept Using It — But Now I Really Have to Deal With This

One morning I opened Cloud9 and a popup appeared.

⚠ Notification — Amazon Linux 2 deprecation for Cloud9

On June 30, 2026, Amazon Linux 2 support will be deprecated. For security reasons, we recommend that you use Amazon Linux 2023 as the AMI to create a new environment or you can move the existing environment to Amazon Linux 2023 AMI as it is fully supported.

I knew. I'd known all along. But I'd been looking the other way.

My relationship with Cloud9 goes back a long way. I first used it around the time setting up a local development environment had become a hassle. Until then I hadn't trusted the idea of "an IDE that lives entirely in the browser" — but one try and it got me. Accessible from anywhere, and you could share a screen with teammates and do code review. And of course its integration with AWS ran deep. That convenience was the real thing.

The magic of "develop anywhere" with just a browser

What made Cloud9 special to me was the sense that I could carry the whole environment with me. Change laptops, or work on a low-spec machine, and my development environment was right there the moment I opened a browser.

Lambda function development could be deployed straight from Cloud9, and IAM role integration was automatic. Once you get used to that ease, you don't want to go back to a local IDE. It has a built-in terminal and a file tree. I had almost no complaints.

So, what's happening

This popup points out that the AMI of the Cloud9 environment I'm using is Amazon Linux 2 (AL2). Support for AL2 ends on June 30, 2026, and security updates stop as well. Amazon offers two options.

Option A — Create a new environment: create a new environment with the Amazon Linux 2023 (AL2023) AMI. You'll need to carry over your settings.

Option B — Migrate the existing environment to AL2023: switch the existing environment's AMI following the User Guide. It takes effort, but you keep your environment.

It says you can "just keep using it as is for now," but doing development that connects to production on an environment with no support and no updates is a little frightening. Especially for security-related work.

Honestly, this might be the trigger for moving on

In fact, lately there had been more and more cases where things worked without Cloud9 — VS Code + Remote SSH, or using Cloud Shell. What kept me on Cloud9 anyway was something like the reassurance of a familiar place.

But seeing this notice, I thought: this might be just the right opportunity. While rebuilding the environment on AL2023, I can also make it a time to rethink my own development style. It's a chance to properly sort out which work stays on Cloud9 and which moves to other tools.

What I'll do from here

First, document the existing Cloud9 environment's settings, installed packages, and various dotfiles. Then build the new environment on AL2023 and run them in parallel to check whether I can migrate. There are three months until June 30, so I can do this calmly and methodically.

But there's one thing I want to say. Cloud9, thank you, truly. You were the one that first showed me what a browser IDE could be.

☁️ Environments change, but love for code doesn't. Now, let's make a fresh start on AL2023.

#AWS #Cloud9 #AmazonLinux2023 #DevEnvironment #Migration