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Microsoft Developer Community Blog
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Introducing Microsoft Dev Box

acangialosi's avatar
acangialosi
Icon for Microsoft rankMicrosoft
May 24, 2022
We’re excited to announce that Microsoft Dev Box is now generally available for production use. Microsoft Dev Box is a managed service that lets developers create on-demand, high-performance, secure,...
Updated Jul 10, 2023
Version 6.0
developer
thommck-on-twitter's avatar
thommck-on-twitter
Brass Contributor
Mar 22, 2023

Kram3650 

  • Github Codespaces are pure IDE hosted environments to run VS Code, Visual Studio etc. They are using linux docker containers underneath and fully hosted by GitHub
  • Cloud PCs (Windows 365 or Dev Box) are meant to be SaaS like VDI. Low complexity, less options - biggest Cloud PC is currently 8 vCPU, 32 GiB Memory. They both run off AVD behind the scenes. W365 is licence based, Dev Box uses normal Azure VM consumption costs. So a dev box can run full UI-based apps, anything that runs on Windows (or Subsystem for Linux)
  • AVD is fully customisable from the VM size so if it is available in that region you can use it (think mega RAM, GPU-based VMs). With the extra flexibility comes extra management and governance needs

So they can all be used for different reasons and I wouldn't be surprised if a developer in a large multi-org enterprise had a normal basic corp laptop with access to a W365 Cloud PC, a couple of different Dev Box environments and maybe AVD where relevant, while using Codespaces when wanting a quick IDE anytime they are in GitHub!