Microsoft’s latest Azure announcements echo Intel’s recent focus on the “developer cloud.” At this year’s Ignite, Microsoft is describing Azure’s growing range of developer-centric tools as its own developer cloud, with a focus on building cloud-native applications that reach from GitHub to Visual Studio and out onto the Azure platform.
A key part of Microsoft’s developer cloud is Azure’s role as a flexible infrastructure, not only for deployment but also as an isolated, configurable development platform that can be delivered with minimal administration. Giving developers a sandboxed, self-service platform for code and test within practical constraints is a big change in how we both fund and manage application development—an opportunity to accelerate application development by removing the wait for infrastructure.
How developers are using Microsoft Dev Box
In May 2022 at Build, Microsoft announced its Microsoft Dev Box environment. Building on the commercial Windows 365 cloud PC platform, Dev Box uses cloud resources to host complete development environments that be accessed from any device anywhere. In advance of Ignite, I talked to Anthony Cangialosi, group program manager in Azure’s developer division, about Dev Box and its role in the growing Azure developer cloud.
There’s a lot of value in Dev Box, especially for regulated industries that have strict rules about application development. Cangialosi notes that the current pilot has seen a lot of interest from banks and other financial institutions that need a clear demarcation between code and other work, and even between code developed for different parts of the business. Using Dev Box, it’s possible to give each project its own environment, using Azure Active Directory’s role-based access control to lock down access to the development space, APIs, and service endpoints, using a managed virtual network in Azure along with on-premises Git or other source control instances.
That same approach helps organizations manage contingent staff, consultants, vendors, and contractors by giving them controlled access to resources without exposing their machines to corporate networks or Azure accounts. All you need to do is set up an Azure AD account with access to the appropriate resources.
Using Git repositories along with preconfigured development environments helps support some of the more complex use cases Microsoft is seeing, including one bank that completely resets all developer environments every couple of months. Now, instead of losing days while developers rebuild their toolchains from scratch, you can quickly pull a fresh Dev Box image from either Microsoft’s library or your own, reconnect to Git, and start coding. If you need more power, simply scale up the host VM; if you need less, scale down.
