Programming in the cloud

Programming in the cloud is almost here.  I have to qualify that with almost, as I'm still having some issues setting up my own cloud server, and I always have issues paying real money to subscribe to cloud services.  Why pay when you can host your cloud yourself.  Ubuntu 14.10 has a number of very interesting option for 'Metal as a Service' (MaaS) which allows you to virtualize a group of machines to make a cloud and not worry about which machine is hosting what.  Now all I have to do is find a bunch of commodity machines, some network attached storage (NAS) load the MaaS software and flip the switch and hope I don't take down the electric grid here in Fircrest.  Perhaps I can find some company that dumping it's four year old laptops and get a deal.  I've had some experience with virtuallizing machines, but gave up on that for the time being as I had other things to deal with.  And now my 6-core machine is a gaming platform that really rips.  So commodity machines, or bare motherboards on spacers might be a better answer than a single multi-core machine.  Sure you have the network latency, but you can also swap out machines if they break with minimal effort, and you can add cores (assuming each board has a cheap single core CPU), and the energy requirements are minimal as there's no graphics card for any of them.
But first I wanted to try the cloud programming platform 'Cloud9' on Art which I set up in my previous blogs, but has no specified purpose other than a Linux platform to do some development on.  So it has all the prerequisites for my own implementation of Cloud9.  The Cloud 9 people are obviously hoping I'll just use their services, where I can logon and get a programming IDE in my browser.  They also offer the software for free if you've got the intestinal fortitude to install and configure it yourself.  I've got the intestinal fortitude, I'm just a little short on patience, so once I got it up and running, I had some issues with figuring out how to use it, how to set up a workspace, etc.  But that's no difference than my experience with Eclipse, as it seems pretty opinionated about how everything should be set up, and I have my own ideas that I deem optimal.  I would like to get Cloud 9 functioning, as it would open up development on any machine with a decent browser and a screen big enough to read with my glasses.  No more having to set up all the prerequisites on any machine I want to do development on, and keeping them in sync and wondering if I have Mongo or whatever installed.
So this is my next project in my home network system, finding some company that's having a fire sale on out of date (for windows) laptops, and setting up MaaS with Art being the controlling node.  That should allow me plenty of space in which to experiment with setting up and eliminating environments until I can get one that works at the level I expect.  At the same time I'm going to continue to work with Cloud 9 to see if I can get it to function in a way that I expect, and have my all purpose browser-based IDE and stop worrying about which of my computer has this software or that software.  This weekend I'll do more work on Cloud 9 and see if I can figure it out, and give some step-by-step instruction on setting it up in my next blog.