As part of Microsoft"s Build 2023 developers conference, the company announced the general availability of Azure Deployment Environments. This new Azure service is designed to give developers faster access to their cloud app infrastructure with the use of project-based templates. Best of all, it"s free to access at Microsoft"s site right now.
Azure Deployment Environments was first announced a year ago by Microsoft at Build 2022. In the past year, the company has been working with over 30 businesses from a wide variety of industries to test out this new service. Microsoft says this new system is designed to help app developers connect to cloud services with a self-service approach, so they can spend more time writing code.
The company stated:
Developers gain fast, easy access to their environments through on-demand or automated deployment. If a developer has an idea on how to make their environments better, they can edit and submit their own templates via a pull request to the infrastructure-as-code template repo—helping promote best practices and InnerSource among teams.
Microsoft said this approach to cloud app development can also help with cutting down on a lot of redundant work. This is due to the fact that admins can set up Azure Deployment Environments developers with their own pre-approved templates. Microsoft says this will also help with collaborations between app developers.
In addition, support for Terraform infrastructure-as-code files in Azure Deployment Environments has also been added in early access, which app developers can sign up for right now. Microsoft stated:
The service already supports Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates; adding Terraform support means that customers who use Terraform will be able to directly import their existing templates into Azure Deployment Environments.
Microsoft added it plans to add support for other infrastructure-as-code formats such as Pulumi and Ansible. It did not reveal a specific time when this support will be included in Azure Deployment Environments.
In case you want to read more, you can find the rest of the Build 2023 coverage here.