What are Azure DevTest Labs?

Azure DevTest Labs is a service provided by Microsoft Azure that helps developers and testers quickly create safe and isolated environments for development and testing purposes. 

With increasing virtualization, dozens of Virtual Machines and lab environments with various PaaS resources are deployed for day-to-day operations. To tackle the mayhem of large scale cloud environments created and forgotten, organizations need an approach for efficient management of Virtual machines and lab resources.

Azure DevTest labs offer pre-developed ARM (Azure Resource Manager) templates to easily create VMs and make workflow seamless and timesaving. 

Here are some more use cases of DevTest labs in Azure

DevTest Labs in Azure offers a central platform for management of various lab infrastructure and resources.  By leveraging VM templates, dev engineers can spin up any Windows or Linux environments on the go.  

Apart from ease of operations, DevTest labs in Azure offer various other features to enable management of VMs at scale. 

1. Recreate any number of VMs using templates and artifacts. 
2. Efficiently manage lab resources to control costs. 
3. Assign various cost-management and security policies at scale. 
4. Create and deploy environments for demos, training, sandbox, and software testing. 

Why use Azure DevTest labs? 

Software enterprises involve workloads that require many VMs. Azure DevTest labs make it possible to produce an entire set of VMs from a template. Also, you can simply replicate a VM as per your requirement. The user interface allows for a hassle-free experience, where lab users can view the number of deployed VMs along with their status.

Moreover, DevTest labs have proved to be highly cost-effective as it is free and organizations only pay for the VMs, it also comes with a range of features like automated VM schedules to shut down labs after a scheduled interval. This ensures none of your VMs are left running. 

Some benefits of using Azure DevTest Labs: 

1. Easy provisioning: DevTest Labs makes it easy to quickly set up and configure a test environment, with a range of pre-configured virtual machines and templates to choose from. 
2. Cost control: DevTest Labs provides a flexible and cost-effective way to manage testing costs, by automatically shutting down virtual machines that are not in use and only charging for the actual resources consumed. 
3. Collaboration: DevTest Labs supports collaboration between development and testing teams, allowing multiple users to access and work on the same environment. 
4. Integration: DevTest Labs integrates with other Azure services and tools, providing a seamless and integrated experience for developers and testers. 
5. Security: DevTest Labs provides a secure and isolated environment for development and testing, with access control and network security features to protect sensitive data and resources.