How Devboxes map to VM primitives
Devboxes are the primary user-facing object in Morph Cloud: they’re optimized for development, prototyping, and collaboration.
Under the hood, Devboxes are built on the same core primitives that power the rest of Morph Cloud:
- Images
- Snapshots
- Instances
- Branches
The key difference is that Devboxes package those primitives into a “workspace” product surface with additional capabilities (templates, sharing, tmux automation, and convenient preview URLs).
When to use Devboxes vs Instances
Use Devboxes when your goal is:
- Development (VSCode/Cursor/SSH, tmux for CLI agents)
- Prototyping (preview URLs for apps/APIs)
- Sharing & collaboration (share live workspaces inside orgs)
Use Instances directly when you need:
- fine-grained VM lifecycle control,
- direct snapshot manipulation and orchestration,
- sophisticated fan-out patterns (e.g. RL environments, test-time scaling),
- custom infrastructure workflows.