The intent of this specification and related tools is to expand the reach of development containers, allow the usage of containers by themselves or different orchestration technologies, and allow any tool to manage and create them.

A development container allows you to use a container as a full-featured development environment. It can be used to run an application, to separate tools, libraries, or runtimes needed for working with a codebase, and to aid in continuous integration and testing.

A GitHub Action and an Azure DevOps Task are available for running a repository's dev container in continuous integration (CI) builds. This allows you to reuse the same setup that you are using for local development to also build and test your code in CI.

Our development container teams across Microsoft and GitHub continue active development on the new Dev Container Specification, and this iteration had several exciting highlights.