AI agents, model context protocols (MCPs), and emerging AI workflows are fundamentally transforming software development paradigms and broadening the range of applications we can create. Developers are expected to keep up with the pace of innovation, but that’s hard to do when working from traditional development environments or legacy VDI solutions.

With Microsoft Dev Box, developers get AI-powered, ready-to-code cloud dev environments with the tools they need for AI development, and platform engineers stay in control, with built-in tools to manage and secure everything at scale.

Accelerate AI development and stay in the flow

Developers need powerful, ready-to-code environments that just work. Starting today, Dev Box provides serverless GPU support (Preview), giving developers on-demand access to GPU compute, powered by Azure Container Apps. This means you can spin up GPU containers in Dev Box without doing manual setup or dealing with IT support tickets.

Not every task needs a GPU, but the list of development scenarios that benefit from GPU resources is expanding—from experimenting with AI models and running inferencing tasks to processing large datasets or doing intensive simulations. Until now, when a developer hit a point in the project when they needed a GPU, they would have to go through a slow process to configure Azure resources and get permissions, and supporting admins would have to manage the GPU infrastructure as well. This approach adds unnecessary toil for everyone involved and can be prohibitively expensive. Now, Dev Box simplifies access to serverless GPU resources and avoids the added costs from dedicated GPUs. In a couple steps, platform engineers can add serverless GPU to the projects that need it, and you can get the compute power you need, when you need it.

But not every AI task requires a GPU. For scenarios where you need to get started with existing AI models, we are excited to announce that you can now access preconfigured Azure AI resources directly from your dev boxes (Preview). Like the Dev Box serverless GPU experience, platform engineers can easily configure Azure AI resources for specific development projects so that you can get a zero-config experience when accessing large language models (LLMs) from Azure AI Foundry.

Direct access to LLMs in the development environment streamlines key tasks like prompt tuning, model comparison, and building agent-based workflows. When building an AI app, this means faster iteration, the ability to test ideas in real time, and minimum setup time when integrating powerful LLM capabilities into your app.

Beyond advancing AI development, Dev Box now further elevates developer productivity through the new Dev Box Model Context Protocol (MCP) server (Preview). This provides developers with a faster, more intelligent way to interact with Dev Box infrastructure from within their Visual Studio Code environment to help eliminate context switching and speed up workflows.

Now you can use conversational prompts to create, customize, and control dev boxes without ever leaving your IDE. Instead of going to the Dev Box developer portal, you can simply ask GitHub Copilot agent mode to do things like give you a list of your running dev boxes, create a new one, or perform actions like shutdown, restore, troubleshoot, delete, and more—all from the chat window in VS Code—for a more intuitive, focused development experience. For example, imagine you want to experiment with your code but are worried it might break your setup. You can now take a manual snapshot of your dev box (Preview), and if something goes wrong, you can revert to a previous working state with a natural language prompt in your IDE. This way, you can experiment with confidence, knowing that you can easily maintain your current setup. And to further streamline your workflow and minimize disruptions, you can now open your dev box directly from the VS Code extension (Preview) —ideal for scenarios that don’t require an RDP connection or involve high-latency networks.

Create custom dev environments for teams with an agentic workflow

Project onboarding is often a major hurdle in software development, especially for enterprise teams working on complex, AI-powered applications that require extensive tooling, large dependencies, and specialized environments. Configuration challenges slow down teams before they even start coding. Dev Box solves this problem by enabling dev leads to quickly create and scale custom configurations for their teams regardless of project complexity.

To further simplify and scale project-based environments, we are excited to announce the general availability of team customizations and Dev Box imaging. With team customizations, dev leads can define a single configuration file with all the necessary tools, packages, and settings required for a project, while developers get ready-to-code environments at the click of button, eliminating configuration chores and ensuring consistent experiences across the team.

Now, dev leads don’t even have to write manual configuration files. We’re excited to introduce the authoring agent workflow in Dev Box (Preview), which allows dev leads to generate a custom .YAML config file using GitHub Copilot agent mode. This speeds up setup while giving dev leads full control to review and refine config files.

With the Dev Box VS Code extension, you can open your repo in VS Code, launch agent mode, and simply say, “Help me configure a dev box for this repo.” GitHub Copilot scans the code, understands the app stack, and generates a complete YAML file. If you need to customize the setup, just ask Copilot to add the additional tools, libraries, and settings you need. Copilot updates the YAML file in real-time, and once you’re satisfied, you can validate and apply these updates directly to the team’s configuration. This streamlined process ensures every developer gets an environment tailored to their specific project while eliminating manual work for dev leads.

Once team customizations are ready, Dev Box now gives dev leads the option to convert customizations into optimized images with a single click. This helps to keep provisioning times low and remove IT overhead associated with managing custom image pipelines. Dev Box brings speed, consistency, and now AI-assisted automation to environment configuration to enable more scalable development experiences across teams and projects.

Control and secure environments without sacrificing developer productivity

While enhancing agility for development teams is essential, it’s equally important to ensure that development remains secure, governed, and cost-effective. Dev Box empowers platform engineers to strike this balance by enabling developer self-service within enterprise guardrails.

To support this goal, we’re introducing several new management capabilities in Dev Box, including project policy governance (Generally available). Platform engineers can now define more granular guardrails around resources—like SKUs, images, and networks—on a per-project basis, helping ensure that resources stay secure, isolated, and optimized for each development effort.

In addition, we’re excited to announce that auto-stop on schedule and hibernate on disconnect features allow central teams to automatically hibernate or disconnect idle dev boxes so organizations can control costs across projects, teams, and regions without manual intervention (Generally available).

We’re also adding several new features and enhancements that further simplify management at scale and improve the overall reliability of the service that include:

• Developer offboarding: Automatically disable or remove dev boxes when users exit a team or organization. (Preview)
• Monitoring logs: Access detailed logs for better auditing and troubleshooting. (Generally available)
• Admin onboarding template: Make it easier for organizations to get started with Dev Box. (Generally available)
• On-behalf-of creation: Allow admins and dev leads to create dev boxes on behalf of developers. (Preview)
• Backup SKUs: Ensure reliable dev box creation during regional constraints. (Preview)
• Region moves: Enable admins to move dev boxes to different regions, optimizing for end user location. (Generally available)

Additionally, we have also expanded Dev Box regional availability to Spain Central and UAE North, enabling customers to deploy the service closer to developers in those regions while meeting local compliance requirements.

We’re also excited to introduce the Dev Box accelerator guide to provide organizations with a fast track to deploying Dev Box securely, consistently, and with confidence. It provides a codified deployment method and best practices for rolling out Dev Box across different stages of adoption. Based on Microsoft’s Cloud Adoption Framework, the goal of the accelerator is to enable deployments that are secure, scalable, and compliant from day one. It includes enterprise-ready reference implementations to guide rollouts and reduce risks, along with pre-built Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) templates to enable automated deployments at scale and eliminate manual overhead.

Find out how Fujitsu empowers global dev teams with Dev Box

Today, we have almost 45,000 Microsoft developers benefiting from secure, self-service experiences and ready-to-code environments on Dev Box. And beyond Microsoft, we are hearing from customers that are also reaping the benefits of the service for developers and their wider organization. Fujitsu is one powerful example of how deploying standardized cloud development environments for globally distributed teams can improve developer productivity, help strengthen security, and support innovation efforts. Read the full Fujistu story to learn about how they are taking advantage of Dev Box today.

Transform your development experience

As software development evolves, developers need fast, flexible, and secure environments to help them keep up. Microsoft Dev Box combines developer self-service, ready-to-code environments for teams, and essential governance capabilities, all in one powerful cloud platform. With new features that empower AI development and unlock agentic workflows, your teams can innovate faster and rise to their full potential with Dev Box.

Learn how Dev Box can transform the way your teams build. Check out our livestreamed breakout session, Unleash developer potential with AI and Dev Box, our public roadmap, or try Dev Box out with your teams today.