When you think about cloud services for developer productivity, the emphasis is usually on the local development environment, where you can reduce hours of work to a few seconds of setup. https://github.com/features/codespaces gets that down to a few seconds for working on repos in Visual Studio Code (Google Cloud Workstations offers similar with https://blog.jetbrains.com/idea/2022/10/remote-development-in-jetbrains-ides-now-available-to-google-cloud-workstations-users/s) and https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/dev-box/ gives you an entire preconfigured developer workstation in the cloud.
Azure Deployment Environments apply the right mix of policy to app environments and give developers the permissions they need at different stages of development and deployment; Image via Microsoft.
“As you have a development team that’s working on a common project, you can define the developers that have permissions to set up the developer workstation through Dev Boxes, as well as deployment environments that are predefined for them, that they can create in the same service.”
Dev Box allows a Windows shop to turn developer workstations into fully managed cloud services.