How We United 8 Developers Across Restricted Environments Using Azure VMs and Dev Containers

Introduction: When Traditional Solutions Hit a Wall

Last month, I found myself facing a challenge that I’m sure many of you have encountered: How do you enable seamless collaboration for a development team when half of them work in a locked-down environment where they can’t install any development tools, and the other half can’t access the client’s systems?

Our team of eight developers was tasked with building a proof-of-concept (PoC) for an AI-powered agentic system using Microsoft’s AutoGen framework. Here’s the kicker: this was a 3-week PoC sprint bringing together two teams from different organizations who had never worked together before. We needed a collaborative environment that could be spun up quickly, require minimal setup effort, and allow everyone to hit the ground running from day one.

The project requirements were complex enough, but the real challenge? Four developers worked from a highly restricted corporate environment where installing Python, VS Code, or any development tools was strictly prohibited. The remaining four worked from our offices but couldn’t access the client’s internal systems directly.

We tried the usual approaches:

• RDP connections: Blocked by security policies
• VPN access: Denied due to compliance requirements
• Local development with file sharing: Immediate sync issues and “works on my machine” problems
• Cloud IDEs: Didn’t meet the client’s security requirements

Just when we thought we’d have to resort to the dreaded “develop locally and pray it works in production” approach, we discovered a solution that not only solved our immediate problem but revolutionized how we approach distributed development.

The Architecture That Worked For Us

Here’s a visual representation of what we built, everyone had to work on their personal (non-corporate) laptops for this to work.

flowchart TD
    A["💻 8 Developers
Personal Laptops Only

4 from Restricted Environment
4 from External Environment"]
    
    B["🚫 The Problem

Corporate PCs: No dev tools
Company laptops: No client access"]
    
    C["☁️ Azure VM Solution
Standard D8s v3

8 vCPUs, 32GB RAM
Individual user accounts"]
    
    D["🐳 Dev Container

Python 3.11 + AutoGen
All dependencies included
Consistent environment"]
    
    E["📁 Shared Workspace

Project repository
Datasets and models
Real-time collaboration"]
    
    A -->|"SSH + VS Code Remote"| C
    B -.->|"Solved by"| A
    C --> D
    D --> E
    
    style A fill:#4CAF50,stroke:#2E7D32,color:#fff,stroke-width:3px
    style B fill:#f44336,stroke:#c62828,color:#fff,stroke-width:2px
    style C fill:#2196F3,stroke:#1565C0,color:#fff,stroke-width:3px
    style D fill:#9C27B0,stroke:#6A1B9A,color:#fff,stroke-width:3px
    style E fill:#FF9800,stroke:#E65100,color:#fff,stroke-width:3px

Lets check out how this was built and setup…