To kick off the rollout of its browser-based coding environment, Codespaces, to a wider audience, GitHub is extending access to GitHub Team and Enterprise (cloud) plans.
GitHub is owned by Microsoft and has announced that internally, it transitioned from a macOS model to Codespaces, which is now the default development environment for GitHub.com
Codespaces first debuted in May 2020 and served as a cloud-hosted development environment with all the familiar GitHub features. It’s powered by Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code, which has been accessible as a web-based editor since 2019 and was rebranded to Visual Studio Codespaces in 2020.
The migration of devs environments to the cloud
In September, Microsoft also confirmed that it was consolidating Visual Studio Codespaces to make GitHub Codespaces. The release of Codespaces is a response to a rising trend in the coding world, with many platforms abandoning local development environments for the faster, collaboration-optimized cloud.
Gitpod is an example of a browser-based open-source development environment that recently raised $13 million. Replit, another similar platform, got $20 million for what has been called ‘Google Docs for code.’
CodeSandbox, a platform that enables developers to create a web app development sandbox in the browser, also got venture capital funding.
Access for all users
Taking development environments to the cloud makes it easier for developers to join and collaborate on a project and start coding with few configurations required.
Codespaces was first launched in limited public beta for individuals. The restricted beta will continue, for now, alongside the broader expansion GitHub launched for the enterprise segment.
What the news means is that all businesses on the Team or Enterprise (excluding self-hosted) plans can enable Codespaces in GitHub settings and use them on private repositories. Users can open environments for projects of all sizes with prebuilt images and select VMs of up to 32 cores and 64 GB RAM.
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