GDS intends to adopt a Cloud Development Environment (CDE) to:
- Improve overall developer experience
- Strengthen security and compliance
- Optimise cost efficiency across development activities

ICS, which provides developer devices and core services, has funded this workstream to deliver a discovery and alpha phase focused on determining the feasibility, benefits, and viable options for adopting a CDE within GDS.

The scope of this phase includes:
- Establishing a dedicated development team to lead and deliver CDE discovery and alpha activities.
- Using the alpha phase to support experimentation, not production delivery.
- Identifying and defining priority developer use cases to ensure exploration is grounded in real user needs.
- Testing and comparing multiple CDE solution options against defined use cases, including consideration of security, usability, and operational constraints.
- Gathering evidence and learning to inform future decisions on whether and how a CDE should be taken forward.

The alpha phase concludes at the end of September, at which point:
- Findings, recommendations, and options will be reviewed.
- A clear alpha exit position will be established.

The next stage, subject to approval, will focus on further testing and validation of shortlisted options, potentially moving towards a more defined pilot or beta phase.

Agentic AI –automated engineering capabilities
As part of the longer‑term Cloud Development Environment vision, the programme will explore how agentic AI capabilities could progressively enable more automated, event‑driven engineering workflows, moving beyond individual developer assistants to
platform‑level automation.

This includes the potential for AI systems to:
- Respond to engineering events (e.g. work items, alerts, changes) without continuous human intervention.
- Orchestrate and coordinate development tasks across tools and services.
- Provide early analysis, decomposition, and decision support traditionally performed by engineers.
- Support scalable, repeatable delivery patterns while maintaining security and governance controls.

The Alpha phase will not deliver full automation, but will test whether selected agentic patterns are:
- Technically viable within GDS constraints,
- Secure and operable at platform level,
- Capable of delivering measurable value that could justify further investment.

Evidence gathered during Alpha will inform whether and how GDS should progress towards more automated engineering capabilities in subsequent phases.
Nice to have 
Cloud Dev Environment / Virtual Dev Environment experience highly desired!