Nitrous.IO

Breaking Free from Localhost

Nitrous was built out of our own frustration sharing development environments with teammates.

In April of 2012, Pete and AJ were working together on a new project for a hackathon. We spent much of the evening troubleshooting a configuration error my machine, and found that all of the productivity of the evening was lost due to what turned out to be a very convoluted conflict between a specific version of ruby and specific version of git.

We asked ourselves why it was so difficult for teammates to work on the same environment, and realized the problem was that we were all tied to our own machines. We began dreaming about a world where laptops were just dumb terminals into cloud computing resources -- where programming languages, databases, and other services for building applications were hosted in the cloud and accessible anywhere. The vision for Nitrous was born.

Initial Response

Realizing that environments needed to be in the cloud, we went to work building the first iteration of Nitrous.IO using LXC on AWS. After a few weeks, we launched a demo video of our first supported Rails Environment setup, and had over 5,000 developers sign up in just 24hrs.

We currently serve over 250,000 developers and have helped thousands of workshops, universities and companies streamline their development workflow with consistent, curated environments in the cloud.

We're changing the way the world codes

As engineers, we are a results and data-driven organization. This allows us to ignore much of the bureaucracy of typical large companies. We value people who are doers instead of talkers, who obsess over the details, who listen to data yet know when to trust their gut, and who empathize with our users.