After seeing DigitalOcean Inc. become the industry’s second largest cloud provider on the back of its developer following, Amazon Inc. is moving to making its rivaling infrastructure-as-a-service platform more appealing to programmers. The company today acquired a San Francisco startup called Cloud9 IDE Inc. that has created a hosted workspace for building web and mobile applications.

The editor supports over 100 programming languages along with many of the most popular frameworks that developers use to speed up their work. Cloud9’s most distinguishing feature, however, is its sleek interface. A customizable navigation sidebar lets users quickly find code in large projects, while a set of native collaboration features provides the ability to share that code with colleagues. The platform even packs a messaging tool similar to Slack that enables remote teams to exchange feedback and brainstorm when dealing with a particularly tough design problem.

Cloud9 is available in three paid editions and an open-source version that has all the core features of its commercial counterparts but needs to be managed manually. It’s already possible to deploy the editor on Amazon Web Services, which means that today’s acquisition is likely designed to pave the way for much deeper integration. Implementing the startup’s development platform as a native service in AWS would be the logical next step for Jeff Bezos’ firm given the usage trends on its public cloud.

A sizable and growing portion of the world’s organizations run their application projects on Amazon’s infrastructure, mainly using third party development tools like Microsoft Corp.’s Visual Studio. Many of those customers would happily migrate to a native alternative that doesn’t require buying licenses from a separate vendor. Jeff Bezos’ firm could thereby create a valuable new revenue stream while making its platform more competitive against DigitalOcean and other rivals that don’t have a native IDE.

Yet while there’s a good chance that AWS may be the first major provider to offer a built-in code editor, its lead is not likely to last for long. The public cloud has a long history of one-upmanship that most recently came to the fore in March when Google and Microsoft Corp. introduced homegrown versions of Amazon’s Lambda service a few days apart. It’s entirely possible Redmond might decide to create a cloud-based version of Visual Studio if Jeff Bezos’ firm decides to do so with Cloud9. And while the search giant does not yet have its own IDE, it’s not beyond its ability to build one from scratch. The Alphabet Inc. has contributed numerous development tools to the open-source community in recent quarters, including a framework for building artificial intelligence algorithms.

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