Hi Joseph,
I don't see any "connection problems" as well.
You have the options to have your SAP HANA Developer Edition and choose from several HANA Cloud environment (eg. AWS or CloudShare), and you can connect your SAP Development environment & your SBO-BI to the HANA Cloud. At the "source" side you have SLT/DXC/BODS and the "reporting" side you have JDBC/ODBC/ODBO/BICS using MDX/SQL to HANA. And all your HANA Development on SAP HANA Studio. Even now you can develop your native-HANA apps using the XS Engine/SAPUI5/JavaScript/SQLScript/OData/JSON/XML as well.
If you want to go Productive with your HANA, then you should choose SAP HANA One/Premium, instead of the free-licensed HANA Developer Edition.
PS: Basically all the needed connections are based on: hostname/(external)ip-adress/ports/proxy-server. The Cloud-side is usually "open", so it's then a matter of also opening at your company site, if certain ports are not open (yet).
I hope this will help you.
Regards,
Andre