As you all know I love talking about the Azure DevTest Labs environment these services are so perfect for education as they provide a full self-service sandbox environment in Azure to quickly create Dev/Test environments while minimizing waste and controlling costs, so you can simply provision space and services for students to utilise and then tear them down refresh them and allow the next set of student to utilise the services so a true Lab in the cloud environment.
Azure Dev Test Labs Templates and Machines
The reusable templates which are available in the DevTest Labs environment such as my favourite the Data Science Virtual Machine solves the majority of problems that academics face with central IT teams such as delays in getting a working environment, time-consuming environment configuration, production fidelity issues, and high maintenance cost.
With the availability of APIs, PowerShell cmdlets and VSTS extensions this make it perfect solution and Dev/Test environments can easily become a replacement for physical lab machines In Azure DevTest Labs can also be used in other scenarios like training and hackathon last month we trailled this service with University College London for an academic machine learning workshop to great success.
If you aren’t using it turn it off
Well saving costs is key to all of use and the No1 facility in Azure Dev Test labs is the ability to auto-shutdown
The auto shutdown feature is now also available under the setting of VM auto-shutdown, this feature is now available on Azure to all ARM Azure Resource Manager based Azure Virtual Machines. I have covered ARM in a number of previous blogs.
With this new feature, setting auto-shutdown is simply now a small number of steps:
Setting Up Auto Shutdown on ARM Based Virtual Machines in Azure
Step 1. Go to your VM blade in Azure portal.
Step 2. Click Auto-shutdown in the resource menu on the left-side.
Step 3. You will see an auto-shutdown settings page expanded, where you can specify the auto-shutdown time and time zone. You can also configure to send notification to your webhook URL 15 minutes before auto-shutdown. This post illustrates how you can set up an Azure logic app to send auto-shutdown notification.
Interested in Azure Dev Test Labs? check out the learning resources below
Learning Resources
To learn more about this feature or see what’s more Azure DevTest Labs can do for you, please check out our announcement on the Azure DevTest Labs team blog.
To get latest information on the service releases or our thoughts on the DevTest Labs, please subscribe to the team blog’s RSS feed and our Service Updates.
For more information about its value propositions, please check out our GA announcement blog post.
If you are interested in how DevTest Labs can help for training, check out this article to use Azure DevTest Labs for training.