Tools for the cloud

Tools for the cloud - Part One - Getting your environment right

Basics

I don’t know about you, but getting the right tools for the right task is mandatory in order to work in ideal conditions. In that sense, I have put together a set of tools that I use on a daily basis to make sure i comply with my principles while working with the cloud. My employer, AWS, kindly provides me with a 13” macbook pro that I customized to my needs.

Most of these tools are open source, which is a great thing, and very often means free{dom} and open standards; however, i still use commercial software for specific needs.

The most basic need in a great work environment, laptop platform aside, is a smart Text Editor, one that can at least help you with syntax highlighting, auto-complete, lint of many kinds, hopefully via plugins, support for json & github; my choice for the job, in alphabetical order:

• Atom — From the guys who brought you github.
• Sublime — Not completely free, yet, amazing performance.
• Vim — Lightweight, Oldschool, Vi IMproved.

While I personally use Atom (and been using all the others in that list), here are a few of the plugins I added:

• atom-material
  • atom-material-syntax
  • atom-material-ui
• file-icons
• linter
• linter-jshint
• minimap
  • minimap
  • minimap-hide
  • minimap-pigments
• pigments
• pretty-json
• seti-syntax

Of course, this tool could very well be an IDE, right ? Again, my weapons of choice in that domain:

• Eclipse CHE — Your IDE, in the cloud
• Visual Studio for Mac — Excellent integration on MacOS, great features

Making your life easier

Installing tools without too much hassle (breaking dependencies, compilation times, etc.) required a package manager, and my quest was over when I found brew; it’s easy to install/manage/update packages via your terminal (speaking of which, my terminal of choice on macOs is iTerm2).

/usr/bin/ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"
brew update
brew install awscli aws-shell aws-keychain

Working for and on AWS, I interact with many of the services using the AWS CLI, and an additional layer - aws-shell makes it very easy not to forget those much needed documentation, switches and other parameters. Additionally, I found that aws-keychain did the trick for me in managing my EC2 Instances private keys.

Part II, soon :-)

Nicolas David

Entrepreneur, Autodidact, OpenSource enthusiast, Amateur photographer & Food aficionado.

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