GitHub Codespaces

2021: Launch Cloud for Collaborative Software Development

In early August 2021, GitHub announced the launch of a cloud for corporate customers to jointly develop Codespaces software. The service became available as part of Team and Enterprise tariff plans designed for business customers.

GitHub first introduced Codespaces in May 2021. The basis of this tool is Microsoft's Visual Studio Code platform, which was later renamed Visual Studio Codespaces. Microsoft previously reported that it combines Visual Studio Codespaces with GitHub Codespaces.

According to VentureBeat, the Codespaces service has great potential, as an increasing number of platforms are abandoning local development environments in favor of faster and easier to collaborate clouds. For example, Gitpod is an open-source browser development environment that raised $13 million in 2021, and Replit received $20 million to create what is called Google Docs for code. The company CodeSandbox, which allows developers to create a sandbox for developing web applications in a browser, also received the support of venture capital.

Moving the coding environment to the cloud makes it easier for developers to join and collaborate on the project as a whole, and start coding with minimal settings.

GitHub Codespaces was initially launched in limited public beta testing for individual users and the company confirmed that this beta testing will continue until November 2021 along with wider distribution. All companies on Team or Enterprise tariff plans (excluding stand-alone) hosting can proactively enable Codespaces in GitHub settings, and from August 2021 they can use Codespaces in all their private repositories.^[1]

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