If you're referring to full-blown IntelliJ, Elcipse, VS, etc, the answer is no afaik. But if syntax highlighting, code completion and lightweight refactoring (within and across files) counts, then Caret or Zed might be worth a look. These are native Chrome apps, and don't require web access/connectivity. (I wrote most of the Chromebook piece in the OP and all my Go code using Caret, and am happy with it). I did some toy stress testing by opening up a few copies of War & Peace (1.5M+ line) text files in Caret. It took a couple of seconds to load, but search & replace and rapid scrolling/navigating worked well. Trying the same thing in vim either in Termux natively or via local ssh didn't hiccup at all. As mentioned in other threads, it's a side effect of design decisions, and naive assumptions about in-memory files. Kids today...
(author here) I think this was misunderstood. I don't mean the _entire_ Chromebook or OS was unstable -- just the opposite actually. I was referring to having to restart Termux twice in two weeks. Two weeks of constant wake/sleep cycles on and off battery, and plugging/unplugging from an external monitor.
In one case it was a hard kill and I lost one ssh window that had been open for a week. In the other, the Termux gui came up and I never dropped my session (the ssh process never died). I'm not yet familiar enough with the Termux internals to understand that. As far as the Chrome OS stability, it's been one of the most stable machines I own, and I say that as a long-time MBP & Librem owner. 99% of the reboots were intentional as I reinstalled the whole build from Powerwash to Erlang hello world, to make sure I got the details right for the post (and to help troubleshoot some minor install roadbumps a couple of my reviewers experienced).
On the presentations, I joined multiple Hangouts & BlueJeans (WebRTC) video client calls with zero trouble. Signal and Wire voice worked like a champ too.
So while I certainly understand some of the comments here, for _my_ use case — a reliable $160 multi-week travel/burner dev notebook with strong security, I'm more than satisfied. And of course it's not in the same league as my $2K++ MBP. I would never try to run a big JDK app, but for offline Go and Python work, it fits my bill.
Now, I'll grant you, Palo Alto and San Mateo have a fair number of unexceptional ranch homes in this region, but it's bullshit to claim that you have to spend $1M to secure a minimally-decent family home in the Bay area.
Actually, I would call 5.3 as a fairly major jump - namespaces, closures (Lambda/anonymous functions), late static binding, const's allowed outside of classes. There are several popular PHP frameworks that require v. 5.3+. Some people even go so far as to call the 5.3.x branch “php 6 without Unicode”.
They've been very reliable for us. Network is spiky (12-20MB/s at times), but otherwise, compared to roughly equivalent VMs (lscpu, /proc/cpuinfo, etc.) they are hands-down faster than AWS. In the limited testing we've done on AWS SSD AMIs (optimized for cluster compute), AWS wins on network and CPU, but at literally 10X the cost.
For example, calculating 8th order Fermat prime factors (single thread/core intensive, so ymmv), EC2 XLs are getting smoked by 20-50% vs. Digital Ocean's 2 core 2GB RAM/40GB SSD. Replicated in multiple data centers/zones a dozen times. Not bad for $20/month!
Also, for the low end, remember "core" on EC2 is throttled at 50%-75% for the small & medium instances, translating to lots of stolen cpu time.
Still working out the details on the Rackspace SSD EBS-equivalents, but will post update soon.
But, agreed, given across-the-board I/O benefits of SSD, surprised Amazon isn't offering something in the non-cluster category. And at $2,500+ /mo, the new instances are definitely targeting a very niche use case for burst-heavy batching.
Key line of the article: “Since Netflix focuses on making sure services can handle individual instance failure and since we avoid using EBS for data persistence, we still did not see any impact to our service.”
As an architecture design, the choice to avoid EBS is hotly debated, though many high-profile systems besides NetFlix (SimpleGeo, Sprint.ly) have moved almost exclusively to EC2 instance-backed (local disk) VMs and as a result, avoided the pain of the last 3 major AWS outages.
Too true. Today when Google's App Engine failed hard, they flat out said: "App Engine is currently experiencing serving issues – Python, Java, Go … Oct 26 2012, 07:30 AM-11:59 PM … Current Availability: 55.90%" and showed read/write I/O metrics were spiking through the roof. Their dashboard clearly labeled the relevant icon as the most severe "Service Interruption".