I have recently been helping to define a set of capabilities that can be delivered to customers within Azure and the one I personally have been focused on has been one that I don’t believe gets enough marketing or attention from within Microsoft and that is Azure Dev/Test Labs. Straight out of the Azure documentation, the following is an overview of the service:
Azure DevTest Labs enables developers on teams to efficiently self-manage virtual machines (VMs) and PaaS resources without waiting for approvals.
DevTest Labs creates labs consisting of pre-configured bases or Azure Resource Manager templates. These have all the necessary tools and software that you can use to create environments. You can create environments in a few minutes, as opposed to hours or days.
By using DevTest Labs, you can test the latest versions of your applications by doing the following tasks:
Quickly provision Windows and Linux environments by using reusable templates and artifacts.
Easily integrate your deployment pipeline with DevTest Labs to provision on-demand environments.
Scale up your load testing by provisioning multiple test agents and create pre-provisioned environments for training and demos.
Unfortunately, this overview doesn’t really give you the whole story. The first thing to mention is that DevTest Labs actually is two different services that are built on top of one set of features where certain capabilities are only available in one service and vice versa. The first of these services is DevTest Labs itself which is the most fully featured. The second is really a subset of the capabilities of DevTest Labs and that one is called Lab Services.
You might be asking yourself or wanting to ask me, if Lab Services is a subset of DevTest Labs, then why not just use for DevTest Labs for everything? You certainly can, but there would be a lot more work involved to implement the same features and especially the same level of security and isolation. To better answer this question, let me start by giving you a deep dive into the use cases for using each one as well as a deep into the features and functions of each.