Microsoft announces the general availability of its dev-focused, cloud-based Microsoft Dev Box

First detailed last year, Microsoft Dev Box is now finally generally available. This is Microsoft's "ready-to-code, cloud-based workstation optimized for developer use cases and productivity" and it comes from years of development building on Visual Studio Codespaces.

These preconfigured, container- and Linux-based dev environments served their purposes in 2019, but the demands of developers forced Microsoft to push things further. The result is Microsoft Dev Box, combining developer-optimized capabilities with the enterprise-ready management of Windows 365 and Microsoft Intune.

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The road to general availability has been a long one as Microsoft wanted to take the time to ensure that Microsoft Dev Box was fully enterprise-ready. The company says that it has worked closely with various internal teams to reach this stage, including the Visual Studio team to add built-in integrations that optimize the Visual Studio experience on Dev Box.

Microsoft says that the platform has been designed with numerous usage scenarios in mind, and pricing has been tailored to feedback:

From our initial work with customers, we learned a lot about their usage patterns and the use cases it can support. Dev Box works great as a full-time desktop replacement, or for specialized part-time use. You can spin up a high-powered Dev Box for a particularly compute-heavy task, or a second machine to isolate an experiment or proof of concept.

Initially, we planned on charging for Dev Box based on a pure consumption model -- customers would only pay for Dev Box when it was running, and no more. Unfortunately, while this worked great for part-time Dev Box use, such a model left a lot of variability for administrators that wanted to pay a standardized monthly cost for full-time usage.

To accommodate different use cases, we’ve introduced a predictable monthly price for full-time Dev Box usage while keeping consumption-based, pay-as-you-go pricing that charges up to a monthly price cap. This model strikes a balance between the extremes of full consumption or subscription-only pricing, ensuring devs can optimize their spend for both full-time and part-time use cases.

There years of development really show in Microsoft Dev Box, but there is more to come. Looking to the future, Microsoft says:

We're also actively introducing configuration-as-code customization into Dev Box, which will provide dev leads even more granular control to configure dev boxes around specific tasks and enable them to connect Dev Box provisioning to their existing Git flow.

You can find out more and get started with Microsoft Dev Box here.