Google Cloud Playground
When it launched, this tool from Google was called a lot of things —
most of them good. “Pure genius,” said one reviewer. As our own John
Koetsierdescribed it, “It’s like Codecademy for the cloud, Google App Engine for idiots, or cloud-enabled applications development for newbies.”
The service lets anyone test-drive apps on Google’s App Engine, Compute
Engine, or Datastore — all in just two clicks. Not only does this tool
act as a clever lure to snag devs away from AWS or Azure. It also gives
non-cloud-savvy devs a way to get a little painless experience with
cloud technologies in a very hands-on way. And as a product of the
Mountain View-based, publicly traded behemoth that is Google, it stands a
good chance of being around and supported for quite some time. Have you used Cloud Playground? Take the survey and tell us if you’d recommend it.New Relic
New Relic brings devs the dashboards they want with the metrics they
need. This company makes fascinating and useful reporting tools that
many devs now swear by. The company started out with website stats that
were both handy to have around and easy on the eyes. Then, earlier this
year, the company started offering similar reporting tools for mobile apps, broadening its customer base to include a whole new audience. Even better, New Relic recently launched a plugin system so
you can literally monitor just about any stat from your New Relic
dashboard, whether it’s some secret internal business metric or a
communally published and shared CouchDB monitor. And with a fresh $80 million in funding, we suspect the company is IPO-bound. Have you used New Relic? Take the survey and tell us if you’d recommend it.
Adobe Edge & Creative Cloud
Adobe has made a huge transition over the past year or so. In the
not-so-distant past, the company made its money solely from
desktop-based software, sold in boxes in retail stores or online. Then,
the team did a 180 and shifted to a web-based paradigm called Creative Cloud.
This cloud includes the software you’d expect — Photoshop, Illustrator,
InDesign, good ol’ Dreamweaver — with the as-a-service subscription
model rather than a huge one-time purchase cost. Adobe Edge is
a suite within the Creative Cloud featuring developer tools: a code
editor you can take seriously, responsive design tools that work,
animation tools that use web technologies, and a cross-platform
debugger. Have you used Edge or Creative Cloud? Take the survey and tell us if you’d recommend it.
Parse
Parse is a complete backend for mobile applications, designed to let
mobile developers concentrate on their areas of expertise and never
touch server code. A year ago, the Y Combinator-backed team launched a
new service called Code Cloud, following that release with tools for building Windows apps in the gorgeous Windows 8 paradigm. Facebook snapped up the young company earlier this year, quickly shipping Parse Hosting to prove it’s still innovating inside the social networking giant. Have you used Parse? Take the survey and tell us if you’d recommend it.
GitHub
Who doesn’t use GitHub? We’ve
talked to companies that won’t hire a dev who doesn’t have a strong
GitHub presence. The code-hosting company maintains popular services
such as Page Generator (for putting a pretty face on projects) and Gist
(for sharing code snippets), but its main focus is hosting massive and
often open-source code repositories in the cloud, where contributors can
collaborate and fork to their hearts’ content. The company recently
launched tools for licensing and mobile web views, and even the White House got on board when
drafting the country’s Open Data policy. The startup was famously
bootstrapped until last year, when it raised a jaw-dropping $100 million Series A.Have you used GitHub? Take the survey and tell us if you’d recommend it.
Heroku
The modern web runs on Heroku. When Heroku goes down, it takes a slew of
the world’s favorite apps with it. And when it adds new features, a
boatload of new developers hop on the ship. This platform-as-a-service
company started out as a Ruby on Rails venture. It’s since branched out
to include more technologies than you can shake a stick at: Java, SQL,
Facebook Platform. Its marketplace of add-ons allows for self-service add-on creation and
currently offers tools for popular, complementary services like
Postmark, Redis To Go, and MongoLab. Plus, its leadership takes a strong
view on the value of the cross-platform natureof web and mobile development — a good sign as we move into a mobile-first future. Have you used Heroku? Take the survey and tell us if you’d recommend it.
Microsoft Azure
Microsoft is unquestionably the incumbent of this group. Long an uncool
underdog in some developers’ minds, it maintained a stronghold in the
community of seasoned developers who came up on Microsoft technologies.
Now, however, the company is rolling out a string of beautiful, useful
tools —Visual Studio, anyone? And Azure, its cloud service, is keeping pace with competitors like Amazon Web Services. Now, Microsoft is offering Azure on a by-minute basis, and it also revamped its offering for mobile developers. At an average of 4.7 billion logins per week, San Francisco hipster-devs are running out of juice for the Azure hatorade. Have you used Azure? Take the survey and tell us if you’d recommend it.
Joyent
“I don’t cargo cult often, but when I do, I do it with Node.js.” This is one of our favorite Node jokes.
Node is, briefly, server-side JavaScript. The development of this
open-source technology is sponsored by cloud company Joyent. In addition
to its big data and infrastructure-as-a-service offerings, Joyent also
offers enterprise-grade Node support. The company’s latest product, Joyent 7,
is intended to help Fortune 500 companies with data center management,
Node debugging, and workflow APIs. Last year, the company took a
sizable $85 million round of funding, and its leadership is looking to the future and preparing for the Internet of things and the end of the client-server model. Have you used Joyent’s tech? Take the survey and tell us if you’d recommend it.
Kinvey
Backend-as-a-service company Kinvey is all about mobile.
Its team says what differentiates this service is the absence of
stacks; Kinvey is streamlined to eliminate all the backend-coding and
stack maintenance. Last month, Google App Engine did a Kinvey
integration, too. Aside from becoming a major mobile tech hub, Kinvey’s
founders want to push HTML5 mobile development to the next stage. This
Boston-based startup has raised a total of $7 million in seed and
institutional funding. Have you used Kinvey? Take the survey and tell us if you’d recommend it.
Urban Airship
Urban Airship could be a steampunk novel or a Led Zeppelin tribute band,
but it’s actually a cool collection of mobile marketing tools for app
developers. Its offering includes push notifications and in-app messaging, a mobile relationship management platform, digital wallet tools, and location messaging services. The company locked down a handy Heroku integration to
make the whole process even easier for devs, and its services also work
with Google’s cloud and messaging tools and Kinvey’s
backend-as-a-service. With a fresh $25 million in funding, the Airship isn’t going away anytime soon. Have you used Urban Airship? Take the survey and tell us if you’d recommend it
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