Back then, this new service was only available with a waitlist in private preview.

It is now in public preview.

Announcing its availability, Redmond discusses how this solution not only gives developers the flexibility they need to be productive but also reduces headaches for IT admins regarding resource onboarding, hardware procurement, compliancy, and security.

These workstations integrate with Azure Development Environments, Intune, and Endpoint Manager, allowing you to get up and running in no time with existing project templates.

The company explains this new service best:

“With Microsoft Dev Box, developers can focus on writing the code only they can write instead of trying to get a working environment that can build and run the code. Dev boxes are ready-to-code and preconfigured by the team with all the tools and settings developers need for their projects and tasks. Developers can create their own dev boxes whenever they need to quickly switch between projects, experiment on a proof-of-concept, or kick off a full build in the background while they move on to the next task.

Microsoft Dev Box supports any developer IDE, SDK, or tool that runs on Windows. Developers can target any development workload that can be built from Windows including desktop, mobile, IoT, and web applications. Microsoft Dev Box even supports building cross-platform apps thanks to Windows Subsystem for Linux and Windows Subsystem for Android. Remote access gives developers the flexibility to securely access dev boxes from any device, whether it’s Windows, MacOS, Android, iOS, or a web browser.”

Developers can work with virtual machines ranging from a 4 vCPU / 16GB SKU up to a 32 vCPU / 128GB SKU.

Security is also at the heart of the product since developers will be dealing with sensitive code. Dev boxes are kept up to date using expedite quality updates to deploy 0-day patches across the organization and isolate compromised devices.

Pricing for the service is based on hourly usage and is highly dependent on your resource consumption. Organizations can get the first 15 hours for free every month during the preview period.

You can learn more about Microsoft Dev Box here on this dedicated page.

Subscribers could not access their Microsoft 365 services, including Teams, Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Microsoft Graph API, and OneDrive or Business. Users encountered delays and failures when trying to log in, alongside errors when performing searches or accessing the calendar.

It was a mess!

Redmond was quick to take notice and started work on restoring access.

That done, the company explained after an investigation what caused the outage in the first place:

“We’ve confirmed from our updated service monitoring that all services remain healthy following the targeted restarts. Additionally, we completed our investigation into the potential remaining impact to Outlook on the web and confirmed that this is a known issue which is unrelated to this event.

An infrastructure power outage necessitated failing over Microsoft 365 traffic management servicing users primarily in Western Europe. This action failed to property complete, leading to functional delays and access failures for several Microsoft 365 services.”

According to the software titan, the impact was most severe in Western Europe, but a small percentage of users located throughout EMEA, North America, and even the Asia-Pacific regions were also affected by the downtime.

Good thing is that all the issues have been resolved, so everything is working properly for Microsoft 365 subscribers, both in Western Europe and other parts of the world.

All services are working correctly, according to the service status page.

But it never really materialized for some reason.

And now, we know why.

That is because the company has not abandoned Xbox Keystone but wants to take its time perfecting it. As confirmed in a statement by a Microsoft spokesperson, the device is in the works with some changes that pivoted the project away from its current iteration.

“Our vision for Xbox Cloud Gaming is unwavering, our goal is to enable people to play the games they want, on the devices they want, anywhere they want. As announced last year, we’ve been working on a game-streaming device, codename Keystone, that could be connected to any TV or monitor without the need for a console.

As part of any technical journey, we are constantly evaluating our efforts, reviewing our learnings, and ensuring we are bringing value to our customers. We have made the decision to pivot away from the current iteration of the Keystone device. We will take our learnings and refocus our efforts on a new approach that will allow us to deliver Xbox Cloud Gaming to more players around the world in the future.”

Sound strategy.

There are even some renders made by a fan that hint at what it might look like:

Redmond is pursuing the idea of giving users a cheap device for streaming games from the cloud, what with its recent revelation that more than 10 million gamers use Xbox Cloud Streaming to play console games on smartphones, tablets, computers, and, of course, consoles.

The service is already available on multiple platforms and devices like Windows, Android, iOS, and Xbox.

The next step seems to be making it available on an affordably dedicated device, which will make the service even more accessible to the masses.

Word is that Keystore might hit store shelves with a stripped version of either Windows or Xbox operating system. This approach will enable Microsoft to bundle the device with its services like Movies and TV.

No word yet on when the company plans to announce or expects to ship this device. But with the company already spending years designing and refining Keystone, what’s a little more wait to ensure that it launches with a solid product?

The service has been available for some time now, and apparently, more than 10 million people have tried it.

It looks like the evolution of the service is the launch of a free-to-play tier to entice more people to try it. Fortnite just became the first game to become available as part of these plans, with Redmond working on a whole array of titles.

It stands to reason that the company collected its thoughts on how the service has progressed until now and where it is going.

As the post shows, the service went from Android-only Xbox One S servers to now supporting a range of platforms and devices, including Windows, iOS, and Xbox One. On the backend, we have Xbox Series X server blades that power the whole thing.

Microsoft claims that players in 26 countries now have played on more than 6,000 types of devices, streaming games from the cloud on Android handsets and iPhones to a variety of PCs and computer configurations.

The software titan also discussed how it worked with over 125 developers to create more than 350 games from the Xbox Game Pass catalog that are cloud-enabled.

In fact, the team behind the service has evolved by making it possible for games to be Cloud Aware — a term for simple changes from the developers to streamline and enhance the whole game streaming experience. As a result, more than 150 cloud-aware games now feature touch.

Many more details are available in this post, which you can check out at the link above.

All said and done, Microsoft is one of the few companies to really go all out when it comes to cloud game streaming. In reality, it was probably the only one that could pull off what it has since the journey began in 2020.

This new service is hosted on the Microsoft Cloud, and allows customers to securely stream the full Windows experience to both personal and corporate devices — complete with all their apps, data, and settings.

The availability of faster and omnipresent internet connections has finally made beaming a whole operating system down from the cloud viable, and streaming it to computers.

Windows 365 is currently powered by Windows 10 but will soon offer Windows 11 once the new operating system becomes available later this year.

Redmond has also shared pricing details of the Windows 365 service.

And boy is it ritzy or what!

The software titan currently offered three subscription tiers for Windows 365, with the Business and Enterprise offerings having some slight differences. The main difference being that Business subscriptions are restricted to 300 users, while Enterprise customers can be unlimited.

Secondly, business customers can access the service via a portal, while enterprise clients will need to have it integrated with Microsoft Endpoint Manager.

As for prices, the tiers are Basic, Standard, and Premium, costing $31, $41, and $66 per user per month, respectively. The company also offers the ability to customize these in the full list of tiers where prices range from $20 to $162, depending on configuration.

In terms of hardware, the Basic tier gets you 2 vCPUs, 4 GB RAM, and 128 GB storage, enough for light productivity and web browsing. On the high end of the spectrum, you have 4 vCPU2, 16 GB RAM, and 128GB storage, which should be at home for heaving data processing and high-performance workloads.

You can find more the more details over at the Windows 365 product page.

The company has now released a detailed status update explaining what went wrong.

Apparently, there was an unusual surge in Azure DNS queries from all over the world, which the cloud platform is designed to mitigate through layers of caches and traffic shaping. However, a specific series of events exposed an error in the code for the DNS service that basically made it less efficient.

How, you ask?

The software titan has systems in place that would usually drop illegitimate DNS queries that cause volumetric spikes like this. But because many of the queries were retries, they were considered legitimate. For this reason, the DNS services became unavailable after some time.

But wait, there’s more!

Things only got worse as clients faced errors, as subsequent DNS retries only resulted in more traffic piling up. And this is how things went from bad to worse.

Redmond says the issues started at 9:21PM UTC, and Azure services themselves had been fixed as early as 10:00PM. The company also lined up additional capacity, in case further mitigation was needed. That said, this time exceeded Microsoft’s goal for fixing problems like this.

Since many Microsoft services depend on Azure, recovery times were different for each of them. But the company says that by 10:30PM, most services were back online.

Microsoft has further revealed that it not just fixed the DNS code defect, but has also updated the logic on its mitigation systems to prevent excessive retries. It will continue working to improve the detection and mitigation of volumetric spikes in traffic.

But it certainly was a day to remember!

On the Azure status page, you can see just how widespread the issues are. Every single region around the world seems to be experiencing issues with the network infrastructure in Azure, barring some government clouds. Xbox users, too, should be experiencing some issues with online services including buying games, cloud gaming, and more.

Microsoft says the issue started at 9:30PM UTC, and it has begun working to fix the problem. As of 10:36PM UTC, the company says it has rerouted traffic to its resilient DNS capabilities and it has noticed some improvements in service availability. It will continue to post updates about the outage. If you’re an IT admin, you can keep track of the event under MO248163 in the admin center.

Reports on Downdetector spiked for multiple Microsoft services, too, including Xbox Live, Bing, Outlook.com, and a few others. However, the number of reports seems to be past its peak for those services, so the problems appear to be winding down.

Windows Virtual Desktop.

The idea behind this new service is to allow customers to use their own PC to access a remote Windows desktop with their enterprise environment available. Microsoft describes this as a modern elastic, cloud-based Windows experience that would come with a subscription fee.

Now, we have a handy little leak from none other than WalkingCat, complete with leaked screenshots that reveal the existence of three different tiers.

• Medium tier with two virtual CPUs, 4GB of RAM, and 96GB of SSD storage
• Heavy tier with two virtual CPUs, 8GB of RAM, and 96GB of SSD storage
• Advanced tier with three virtual CPUs, 8GB of RAM, and 40GB of SSD storage

Sounds impressive.

According to these new details, the Cloud PC may also be accessible from the Microsoft Remote Desktop app that is available for Windows, macOS, iOS, and Android. The idea of a remote Windows experience accessible on any device definitely makes it an exciting proposition for enterprise customers.

Microsoft already has an online destination for this Cloud PC offering here, though there is nothing to see on the page except for a “Setting up your workspace” message.

The company will likely officially announce its new Cloud PC offering and pricing details closer to release, which should not be too far off.

It is designed to beam the latest video games straight to your screen.

Any screen.

As this video so aptly shows:

And though Microsoft prioritized some platforms during development and testing, it is now looking at expanding the reach of its game streaming service. The company is even open to bringing it to competing platforms like Nintendo Switch and the Sony PlayStation 5.

Good old Phil Spencer heads gaming at Microsoft. And in a recent interview, he talked about how some platforms were given priority for Xbox cloud gaming:

“We went to PC first after Xbox, because there’s just so many players there, globally, that don’t own an Xbox, that we could go reach. We went to mobile next because there’s a billion Android phones on the planet. It’s significantly larger than any console player base.”

He then confirms that Xbox cloud gaming is coming to both Windows and iOS platforms next, but he also makes a surprise mention of a bunch of different platforms like smart TVs, Chromebooks, Fire TV streaming sticks, even the Switch and PlayStation 5 consoles.

Basically, any and all screens:

“There’s smart TV’s out there, there’s Chromebooks out there, there’s Fire TV out there, there’s a lot of discussions we would have, we would prioritize it based on where we would find the most new players, that we could naturally bring content to. I love the Switch, I love PlayStation, honestly, I think they’ve done an amazing job as being a part of this industry. I’m not sure that those are the next big set of users for us, but we could be open to those discussions.”

Good to know that Microsoft is keen on expanding the horizons of its game streaming service, even if many of these platforms are a way off.

We’ll probably hear more about these plans once Xbox cloud gaming is up and running properly on Windows and iOS.

Long and short of this new launch is that these members will be able to play games that are beamed to their Android devices. All these titles will use the company’s abovementioned cloud gaming technology that has been in testing since fall 2019.

Cloud Gaming in Xbox Game Pass Ultimate is available in 22 markets starting today.

At launch, more than 150 games are available, including popular titles like A Plague Tale: Innocence, Ori and the Will of the Wisps, and The Witcher 3. Plenty of multiplayer games are also in easy access, alongside Microsoft’s own titles like Halo: MCC and Forza Horizon 4.

As this trailer shows, this is about as easy as it gets when it comes to pick and play:

To get started with cloud gaming, all you need to do is download the Xbox Game Pass app from either the Google Play Store, the Samsung Galaxy Store, or the One Store.

Cloud gaming is available for free with an Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscription, and new subscribers can get their first month for just $1 instead of the regular $14.99. And this is one of the reasons why the service crossed the 10 million subscribers mark earlier this year.

As for cloud gaming, this is a strategy that will see Microsoft reach the 2 billion people that play games worldwide.

Save for those who you Apple devices, of course.