Microsoft’s Azure Deployment Environments Service Now Generally Available

DevOps code

Microsoft has announced the general availability of Azure Deployment Environments. It’s a new managed service that lets developers use infrastructure-as-code templates to quickly spin up on-demand app deployment environments.

Microsoft highlighted three key factors for effectively managing cloud-based infrastructure in enterprise environments: speed, usability, and governance. The company has incorporated customer feedback to build Azure Deployment Environments that provide self-service capabilities with standardized project-based templates. Moreover, developers can choose to submit custom templates through pull requests.

“Our journey to Azure Deployment Environments didn’t just start last year at Build—today’s announcement represents the culmination of over seven years of learning, starting way back in 2016 with Azure DevTest Labs. For a long time, we’ve noticed the inefficiencies around how developers gain access to infrastructure, and these challenges have only gotten worse,” explained Sagar Lankala, Senior Product Manager for Developer Division.

Microsoft's Azure Deployment Environments Service Now Generally Available

Microsoft’s Azure Deployment Environments service provides a centralized management and governance experience to development infrastructure teams. It eliminates the time and effort that was previously required to manually provision development environments. IT Pros can pre-define policies for the role-based deployment of the sandbox, dev, test, staging, pre-prod, and production environments.

Microsoft launches new custom developer portal

Microsoft has launched a custom developer portal to streamline the process of creating and managing development environments. The portal also lets developers view, manage, and spin up cloud-based workstations available via Microsoft Dev Box.

Microsoft's Azure Deployment Environments Service Now Generally Available

Last but not least, Microsoft announced that Terraform customers can now directly import existing templates into Azure Deployment Environments. The company is working to add support for Pulumi, Ansible, and other infrastructure-as-code solutions. Microsoft also plans to introduce integration between the Azure Developer CLI (azd) and Azure Deployment Environments.

How to access Azure Deployment Environments?

Microsoft says that organizations can get free access to Azure Deployment Environments today from the Admin Portal. If you’re interested, you can also opt-in to test Terraform support on this page.

Microsoft has also announced several updates for Microsoft Dev Box at Build 2023. The company announced today that the service will become generally available in July, and we invite you to check out our separate post for details.