Chapter 3
Using the Cloud to Connect

Let’s imagine we’re taking our laptop to a café to get a high-quality espresso. Most remote programmers aren’t strangers to working from public locations, but pair programming from these places can be problematic. Ports may be blocked, incoming traffic cannot be forwarded to your machine, and your connection may not be secure. We could log into a remote machine we share with our pairing partner, but we would lose all of our development tools, dotfiles, and other local configuration. Instead, we’ll solve these problem by routing our traffic through a virtual cloud server.

A virtual cloud server is one of the most important tools a remote programmer can have. Virtualization in the cloud is so mature that we can quickly and easily do anything remotely that we can do locally. We’ll use our virtual server to solve many kinds of problems—including the common problem of getting a good connection at a coffee shop.

We’ll begin by creating an Amazon EC2 instance, and setting it up to act as a reverse proxy. A reverse proxy can connect two development machines without our reconfiguring a network router or firewall. We’ll reroute the SSH connection we created in the previous chapter through this tunnel and continue sharing a tmux session. We’ll also route our web traffic through the proxy, and finally we’ll install tmate on the server to make the process easier. Later in the book, we’ll repurpose our proxy server for a variety of other jobs.

Let’s create the server.