GitHub is opening Codespaces to enterprises

Collaborative coding company GitHub has opened up its Codespaces online programming environment to business users.

Announced in May 2020, Codespaces is a browser-based programming environment that lets coders work on projects together in the cloud without relying on self-hosted integrated development environments (IDEs).

It stems from Microsoft's work on a browser-based version of Visual Studio, originally called Visual Studio online, announced at Ignite 2019. That product became Visual Studio Codespaces, and the software giant, which owns GitHub, consolidated it into GitHub Codespaces in September 2020.

Codespaces enables developers to provision standardized development environments in virtual machines, eliminating the need to configure and maintain local development environments. The service is already available without cost for select individuals under a beta program. The company will charge organizations using Team or Enterprise Cloud accounts for access starting September 21, following a trial program.

Virtual machines will be priced by the hour for Team and Enterprise account holders. Prices will start at 18 cents per hour for a two-core system and top out at $2.88 per hour for a 32-core system. GitHub will also charge 7 cents per GB per month for code storage.

Organizations can set a spending limit to avoid cost overruns. Organizations purchasing the service via a Microsoft Enterprise Agreement can pay for the service via their Azure subscription.

GitHub said it has already moved from its macOS-based coding environment to use Codespaces for most of its own development. A blog post describing GitHub’s internal journey to handle virtualized development for a 13GB code base described internal efforts to streamline virtual machine provisioning and speed up internal deployments.