Microsoft Dev Box is Now Generally Available

Microsoft announced today that Dev Box, its cloud-based developer workstation service, has exited preview and is now generally available.

“Dev Box combines developer-optimized capabilities with the enterprise-ready management of Windows 365 and Microsoft Intune,” Microsoft principle group program manager Anthony Cangialosi writes in the announcement post. “As we work to improve Dev Box, we’ve continued to partner with other teams at Microsoft. Most recently, we worked closely with the Visual Studio team to add built-in integrations that optimize the Visual Studio experience on Dev Box. 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.”

Microsoft announced Dev Box at Build 2022 that May, describing it as a new cloud service that would provide developers with secure, ready-to-code developer workstations in Azure for hybrid teams of any size. Dev teams can preconfigure Dev Boxes for specific projects and tasks, enabling developers to get started quickly, it said. And Dev Box provides unified management, security, and compliance for IT so that Dev Boxes can integrate with Intune and Microsoft Endpoint Manager.

Microsoft then released the Dev Box public preview in August 2022, at which point it positioned the service as a potential solution for those businesses that were having trouble getting new PCs because of supply chain issues.

Most recently Microsoft announced several new features for Dev Box as part of its broader Build 2023 announcements this past May, including support for more powerful 16 virtual CPUs/64 GB of RAM and 32 virtual CPUs/128 GB of RAM configurations, support for up to 2 TB of storage, core hibernation, and config-as-code definitions.

And if you’re curious about the path Microsoft took to arrive at Dev Box, you should check out today’s announcement: Anthony Cangialosi describes how feedback after the introduction of Visual Studio Codespaces in 2019, which later morphed into GitHub Codespaces, and the arrival of Windows 365 triggered an interesting strategy shift.

You can learn more about Microsoft Dev Box on the Microsoft Azure website.