At the annual Build conference, Microsoft announced Azure Deployment Environments' general availability (GA). This service allows development teams to create segregated instances within Azure for deploying and managing applications in different stages, such as development, testing, and production, to ensure controlled and consistent deployment processes.

Last year at Ignite conference, the company released the public preview of Azure Deployment Environments after a private preview earlier. The GA release includes new features gathered from the feedback of customers using the private preview onwards. These features are:

• The ability for developers to view, deploy, and manage their environments from a custom developer portal—also houses cloud-based workstations available through Microsoft Dev Box.
• Support for Terraform infrastructure-as-code files, currently in private preview, and support for other infrastructure-as-code formats—including Pulumi and Ansible—is on the backlog.

In addition, Microsoft is working on an integration between Azure Deployment Environments and the Azure Developer CLI (azd), which has been available since last year.

Sagar Chandra Reddy Lankala, a senior program manager at Microsoft, explains the benefits of Azure Deployment Environments in an Azure Developer Community blog post:

By enabling self-service deployment for developers, Azure Deployment Environments also benefits platform engineers and other admins, eliminating redundant work while giving them centralized control to keep environments secure and cost-effective. Rather than repeatedly provisioning environments for different developers, platform engineers provide developers with a catalog of standardized, pre-approved templates, promoting collaboration and knowledge sharing.

Source: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/azure-developer-community-blog/azure-deployment-environments-is-now-generally-available/ba-p/3826373

With the service, users also can establish predetermined rules regarding which roles have the authorization to deploy specific types of environments (such as development, testing, staging, or production), and they can ensure these environments are deployed in the appropriate subscription or management group, incorporating all relevant policies and cost controls.

For developers, the service provides means to spin up an environment to explore Azure or have a sandbox environment for testing purposes. Through the Azure Portal, they can create and access the environments.

Azure Deployment Environments is an addition to the existing services, such as CodeSpaces and Microsoft Dev Box the company made available earlier to enhance developer productivity and coding environments. CodeSpaces allows developers to get a VM with VSCode quickly, and similarly, with Microsoft Dev Box, they can get an entire preconfigured developer workstation in the cloud.

Scott Hanselman, a partner PM at Microsoft - Developer Division Community Manager, concluded in a video on Azure Development Environments:

It's really going to help enterprises take it to the next level. This is the promise of the cloud, its scale and elasticity for your engineering systems.

More details of Azure Deployment Environments are available on the documentation landing page. Pricing-wise, the service is free, and customers will only be charged for other Azure resources like compute storage and networking created in environments.