VS Codespaces vs Azure VM for Development Environment

Question

VS Codespaces vs Azure VM for Development Environment

Jigar Patel 41

I have been using VS Codespaces for my development environment to write my code on a remote machine. VS Codespaces from will discontinued soon. It will be replaced by Github Codespaces. I don't want to migrate to Github Codespaces because I want to use my azure credits.

I think an azure linux VM service will be good enough for remote devlopment. Azure VMs is IaaS. What are the drawbacks of using it compared to Github Codespaces? My guess is that I will have to do updating, patching, and other management work myself? It would be great if someone can provide more details about management work I may need to do for azure VM and how to do it.

If I'm using an azure VM for remote development with with vs code then what can I do to mimic vs codespaces in my azure vm? I'm already aware there is a vs code extension for vs code remote development

Anna Xiu-MSFT 31,056 Reputation points Microsoft External Staff

2021-01-06T02:24:39.447+00:00

As issues with tag “vs-general” and “vs-setup” focus on questions of Visual Studio, your issue is out of our support scope, I would remove the tags.
Thanks for your understanding.

Accepted answer

0 additional answers

Your answer

Anna Xiu-MSFT 31,056 Reputation points Microsoft External Staff

2021-01-06T02:24:39.447+00:00

As issues with tag “vs-general” and “vs-setup” focus on questions of Visual Studio, your issue is out of our support scope, I would remove the tags.
Thanks for your understanding.

Answer 1

@Jigar Patel Apologies for the delay in response and all the inconvenience caused because of the issue.

Yes you can do remote development in Azure VMs. There are a lot of functionalities when it comes to Azure Linux VM.

You can refer to this doc more info.

However, there will be a cost associated with this option. You may wish to perform a IaaS cost calculation and then may choose this option.

Configuration for this scenario is available here

You can make use of Azure Pricing Calculator for calculating the cost associated with machine.

Also the patching and update has to be done manually.

It would be better to do in following steps.

1)Do a cost calculation. If suitable, then create a test environment.

2)Make sure that the environment runs without any issue and gives adequate performance.

The advantage that GitHub Codespaces (GH Codespaces or GHC) brought is that it is integrated directly into GitHub, that is, you can open any repository that you have permission to write in a web-ready editor And all of this is free, for both paid and private repositories in beta mode.

You can read mode about GitHub codespaces here.

Hope it helps!!!

Please "Accept as Answer" if it helped so it can help others in community looking for help on similar topics

Jigar Patel 41 Reputation points

2021-01-06T17:00:28.62+00:00

I looked into another solution called gitpod. It seems to be better than codespaces. It can also be self-hosted on azure. However, I think we are required to use the gitpod IDE from the browser and we can't connect to it from the native VS code IDE on mac or windows.

https://www.gitpod.io/gitpod-vs-github-codespaces/
prmanhas-MSFT 17,946 Reputation points Microsoft Employee Moderator

2021-01-07T05:15:18.573+00:00

@Jigar Patel You can refer to below documentation for more info:

https://www.gitpod.io/docs/

You can chose solution which fit best for your use case since all 3 have their individual benefits for example if cost is problem then gitpod is free option similarly you can check for other components as well.

Thanks

Share via

VS Codespaces vs Azure VM for Development Environment

0 additional answers

Your answer