Cloudomation DevStack:
The Microsoft Dev Box Alternative

Microsoft Dev Box

True to form, Microsoft is the only vendor brazen enough to brand a remote desktop product as a work environment for software developers. Considering Microsoft owns Github, it makes sense it doesn’t want to directly compete with its Github Codespaces CDE product – and Dev Boxes truly are not comparable. 

Microsoft Dev Boxes are Windows machines that users connect to via the Microsoft Remote Desktop app or a browser. They are hosted in Azure and only available in the cloud. They are the only product that calls itself a CDE which is based on Windows, and which uses remote desktop technology. 

Remote desktop technology has been around a while, and there is a reason why it has not caught on among software developers. Giving people access to their work environments via remote desktop is common in some companies, and does affect some software developers at such companies as well. However the main reason why it is not more widely used is the fact that it typically comes with noticeable latency. If you have worked with remote desktop software yourself, you’re probably familiar: you move your mouse, and it takes a while before the cursor moves on the remote desktop screen. You type, and it takes a while for the letters to appear on the remote desktop screen. 

Microsoft addresses the issue of latency which makes remote desktop working unattractive for most people by automatically deploying Dev Boxes to the closest available Azure region. I can’t say if that leads to good experience, but for Microsoft-focused developers of desktop applications, it might be a good alternative since container-based CDEs are simply not suitable for development of Windows Dekstop applications or fat clients.

Since Dev Boxes are Windows machines, any Windows software can run on them. Configurations of the machine specs as well as management of the Dev Boxes is done via a web GUI. Customization of the Dev Box can be done by specifying a custom Windows image to be deployed to the Dev Boxes. This means the Dev Box configuration cannot be done as code but only through manually prepared images.

Microsoft doesn’t list specific IDEs which are availalbe in their Dev Boxes, but I assume it will be any IDE that can be installed in a Windows environment. There is a specific section in the documentation explaining precaching of resources with Visual Studio (not VS Code) to improve performance after starting a Dev Box.

Microsoft Dev Boxes are best for:

• Organisations that develop Windows Desktop applications.

Cloudomation DevStack

Cloudomation DevStack is a highly customisable CDE product. It’s standard deployment model provides full VMs as CDEs to developers. However, the “unit” of a CDE can be customised to whatever the user needs: CDEs can be containers deployed into a Kubernetes cluster, several VMs, or serverless components – or anything else. Customisation of CDE deployment is done using Cloudomation Engine, a Python-based automation engine with broad infrastructure and deployment automation capabilities. Because of this flexibility, DevStack makes it possible to provide suitable CDEs for frontend, backend, data science, and other teams with different infrastructure needs and deployment models, and is particularly suitable for the development of complex, non-standard and/or heavy duty software. 

By asking senior developers how they would like to use a CDE, DevStack focused on features that allow seamless transition to using a CDE, without changing developer’s workflows and allowing them to use their existing tool sets. These features include:

• Synchronisation of the source code between the CDE and the developer’s laptop. Developers have “their hands on the code”, can continue to use any IDE they already have and love, and can work on the code even when offline, reconnecting with their CDE seamlessly when online again. (Note: Synchronisation of source code can be disabled.)
• A powerful command-line interface (CLI) that allows developers to open a terminal directly on the CDE, forward ports, stream logs from the CDE / containers running on the CDE VM, synchronise files between their laptop and the CDE (two-way), to create, start, stop, and delete CDEs directly from the terminal, and store their CDE configuration locally so that CDEs can be spun up with one terminal command. 

Cloudomation DevStack is best for:

• Complex, non-standard and/or heavy duty software development
• Companies that look for one CDE platform that can provide different kinds of CDEs to different development teams (e.g. working on different products with different deployment models, or backend and frontend teams etc.)
• Developers with well-working tool sets and development processes that want a CDE that adapts to their workflow and allows seamless transition to working with the CDE