What modifications do I need to make to my workflow, and which skills do I need to learn in order to develop with Ruby On Rails on a Linux cloud server on Amazon Web Services (AWS)?
In particular, I am concerned that it won’t work, or it will be much more difficult than developing on my Windows netbook, which is adequate for PHP development with XAMP.
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No – there is no harm in using an AWS Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instance for your development platform.
But you will have to learn some extra skills that you wouldn’t need when developing on a local machine
- how to use AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM),
- how to use AWS billing (if you exceed the one year free micro instance), and
- how to use SSH.
It is just as easy to run a Linux virtual machine to develop in Rails, or indeed to develop in another operating system such as FreeBSD, Mac OS X and Windows. Virtual machines can be slow on a netbook, but native development is often acceptable. RoR doesn’t require much more resources than XAMP, but it depends on your application, so you will have to try it and see.
An AWS micro instance has similar power to a netbook (as of 2015.)
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