At last year’s Build, Microsoft announced Dev Box, a new Azure service offering ready-to-code developer workstations. In August last year, Microsoft announced the public preview of Microsoft Dev Box from the Azure Portal. At Build 2023, Microsoft today announced that Dev Box will be generally available in July.
Since last year, Microsoft has tested Dev Box with 50 enterprise organizations around the world and even deployed Dev Box to more than 9500 engineers at Microsoft in the Developer Division, Azure, Office, Bing, and Windows teams.
Microsoft Dev Box service will allow organizations to preconfigure Dev Boxes for specific projects and tasks. This will enable developers to build and run their app in minutes.
- Developers stay in control of their Dev Boxes with a developer portal that enables them to create and delete their Dev Boxes for any of their projects.
- Microsoft Dev Box supports any developer IDE, SDK, or internal tool that runs on Windows.
- Microsoft Dev Boxes are hosted in the Microsoft cloud, you can access them from anywhere: Windows, MacOS, Android, iOS, or your web browser.
- To keep costs under control, you can use start/stop schedules to spin up Dev Boxes at the beginning of the day and automatically hibernate them when you go home.
The Dev Box workstations can be configured from 8 to 32 core vCPUs, up to 128 GB RAM, and 2 TB of storage. Project and role-specific images that can be pre-built with all the tools, configurations, source, and binaries to help developers get straight into their code. Project-based virtual networks enable admins to limit access to sensitive resources,
databases, or internal endpoints to approved team members on specific dev boxes.
To allow organizations to easily get started with Dev Box, Microsoft has created several developer-focused starter images for Microsoft Dev Box on the Azure Marketplace. Some of them include Windows client for developers, Microsoft Visual Studio 2019, Microsoft Visual Studio 2022 and more. These images contain Windows optimizations, apps, and settings to improve the overall developer experience.
