Cloud9 has sadly been decommissioned and AWS customers are advised to decommission and replace Cloud9 environments
AWS Cloud9 is a virtual integrated development environment designed for seamless integrated development and deployment to AWS. Purchased by AWS in 2016, Cloud9 has operated continuously until 2024, when AWS announced that they would stop investing in Cloud9 and would no longer offer the service to new customers. Existing users are encouraged to transition to alternative services that meet their needs.
As AWS Cloud9 is no longer being actively supported, it would be wise to migrate away from it to prevent any potential disruptions in your development workflow due to shutdown or reduced availability. This concern is a significant reason as to why SkySiege detects Cloud9 environments during our assessments; the Cloud9 service could be discontinued at any time with substantial impact to usual business operations.
While AWS has historically provided reliable customer support and may maintain the service for some time, it’s essential to safeguard your operations by moving to a new service as soon as feasible. This proactive step will eliminate the risk of workflow interruptions.
The remediation strategies will depend on your specific workflow. For instance, if you were using the Cloud9 environment for direct access to a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), AWS CloudShell can serve as an effective replacement. With proper configuration, CloudShell functions as a serverless terminal, allowing direct access to your environment via directly connecting to your VPC. This provides full network access to any services within that VPC, including those residing in private subnets. SkySiege engineers often use CloudShell for accessing databases and other secure networks, it’s great and we recommend it highly.
Another option is to leverage local Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) and Cloud Development Kits (CDKs) released by AWS. These tools facilitate contextual development on your local machine, offering benefits similar to those provided by Cloud9 but with locally run tools and IDEs such as VSCode.
Given that Cloud9 environments were highly customizable, each developer should evaluate what workflows they will need to migrate to effectively replace their Cloud9 setup. It is advisable to start this comparison while Cloud9 is still operational, ensuring that every necessary feature is transitioned rather than risking loss of functionality during a rushed migration.
SkySiege customers benefit from automated detection of Cloud9 environments across their entire organisation, complete with visualization and identification of Cloud9 environment owners. This capability allows you to efficiently track workloads that require migration and identify any remaining active Cloud9 environments. Furthermore, this information ties back into SkySiege’s assessment tracking for user and role activity, giving you full tracking of which engineers are using Cloud9, how active they are and therefore which of your AWS workloads are still dependent on this depreciated service.
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