What are Workspaces?

A workspace in Devsy is a containerized development environment that holds a project's source code along with the dependencies needed to work on it, such as a compiler and debugger. The underlying environment where the container runs is created and managed through a Devsy provider. This gives every engineer a consistent development experience no matter where the container actually runs — a remote machine in a public cloud, localhost, or a Kubernetes cluster.

To configure the development container, Devsy reuses the devcontainer.json specification, which is also used by other popular tools such as VS Code dev containers and GitHub Codespaces. This means any project that already uses this configuration can spin up a workspace in Devsy with no extra setup. If no configuration is found, Devsy detects the project's programming language and provides an appropriate template.

A workspace can be stopped and restarted without losing its state, so you can install additional programs or change configuration without reconfiguring the container. Depending on the provider, Devsy also detects when a workspace is no longer in use and shuts down idle resources to keep infrastructure costs down.