{"id":16555,"date":"2016-05-25T23:00:28","date_gmt":"2016-05-25T16:00:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/visualstudioalm\/?p=16555"},"modified":"2019-02-14T17:34:00","modified_gmt":"2019-02-15T01:34:00","slug":"announcing-general-availability-of-azure-devtest-labs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/devops\/announcing-general-availability-of-azure-devtest-labs\/","title":{"rendered":"Announcing General Availability of Azure DevTest Labs"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Today, we are very excited to announce the general availability of <a href=\"https:\/\/azure.microsoft.com\/en-us\/services\/devtest-lab\/\">Azure DevTest Labs<\/a>: your self-service sandbox environment in Azure to quickly create Dev\/Test environments while minimizing waste and controlling costs.<\/p>\n<p>We\u2019ve been hearing from a lot of customers about all kinds of challenges they\u2019ve been facing in their Dev\/Test environments. With the power of cloud, some problems have started being solved such as the hardware maintenance cost. On the other hand, there are still a few problems many customers have to deal with day to day, especially:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The delays in delivering environments to developers\/testers that are introduced by the traditional environments request model;<\/li>\n<li>Time-consuming environment configuration;<\/li>\n<li>Production fidelity issues;<\/li>\n<li>And the high cost of the cloud resource management in order to optimize the resource usage.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><figure id=\"attachment_16575\" aria-labelledby=\"figcaption_attachment_16575\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" ><a href=\"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/6\/2019\/05\/Problem-Statement-new1.png\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-16575\" src=\"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/devops\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/6\/2016\/05\/Problem-Statement-new1-1024x198.png\" alt=\"Dev-test problems today\" width=\"800\" height=\"154\" \/><\/a><figcaption id=\"figcaption_attachment_16575\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Figure 1: The traditional \u201crequest\u201d model introduces delays in delivering environments<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/p>\n<p>That\u2019s why we build Azure DevTest Labs, where you can get your fast, easy and lean Dev\/Test environments specifically for your team and on demand.<\/p>\n<p>Azure DevTest Labs addresses the problems in Dev\/Test environments today majorly through 4 aspects:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><b><strong>Quickly be \u201cready to test\u201d<\/strong>\n<\/b>Flexibly define the VM bases through 3 different ways to boost your environment provisioning: Azure Marketplace images, custom images (your own VHD) and formulas (a reusable base where VM creation settings, such as VM image + VM sizes + virtual network etc., are pre-defined). Reusable artifacts in the DevTest Labs allow users to run VM extensions and install tools, deploy applications or execute custom actions on demand once a lab VM is created.<\/li>\n<li><b><strong>Worry-free self-service<\/strong>\n<\/b>The lab policies and the Azure Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) model in the lab enables a sandbox environment for developers and testers to provision their own environments without unexpected accidents that can introduce a big bill.<\/li>\n<li><b><strong>Create once, use everywhere<\/strong>\n<\/b>ARM templates are fully supported to deploy labs and resources in a lab. Reusable custom images and formulas can be created from an existing VM, and artifacts loaded from VSTS Git or GitHub repositories can be used cross different labs.<\/li>\n<li><b><strong>Integrates with your existing toolchain\n<\/strong><\/b>In addition to APIs and command line tools, <a href=\"https:\/\/marketplace.visualstudio.com\/items?itemName=ms-azuredevtestlabs.tasks\">Azure DevTest Labs Tasks<\/a> are available in Visual Studio Marketplace to better support your release pipeline in Visual Studio Team Services. There are three tasks that allow you respectively to create a lab VM to run the tests, save the VM with the latest bits as a golden image, and delete the VM when it\u2019s no longer needed after the testing is done.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><figure id=\"attachment_16565\" aria-labelledby=\"figcaption_attachment_16565\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" ><a href=\"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/6\/2019\/05\/VSTS-tasks1.png\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-16565\" src=\"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/devops\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/6\/2016\/05\/VSTS-tasks1-1024x513.png\" alt=\"VSTS tasks\" width=\"600\" height=\"301\" \/><\/a><figcaption id=\"figcaption_attachment_16565\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Figure 2: DevTest Labs Tasks in Visual Studio Team Services<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/p>\n<p>You can get a high-level idea around these four aspects within 3 minutes through the video \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/azure.microsoft.com\/en-us\/documentation\/videos\/what-is-azure-devtest-labs\/\">What is Azure DevTest Labs<\/a>\u201d. Or, read our <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/devtestlab\/2016\/05\/25\/announcing-general-availability-of-azure-devtest-labs\/\">official announcement<\/a> at the Azure DevTest Labs Team Blog to get more details.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/go.microsoft.com\/fwlink\/?linkid=627034&amp;clcid=0x409\">Try Azure DevTest Labs<\/a> today, and let us know what you think about it! If you have an idea for how to\u00a0make it work better, submit your feedback\u00a0(or vote for others) at the <a href=\"https:\/\/feedback.azure.com\/forums\/320373-azure-devtest-labs\">Azure DevTest Labs feedback forum<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Have a question? Check out answers or ask a new question at the\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/social.msdn.microsoft.com\/Forums\/en-US\/home?forum=AzureDevTestLabs\">MSDN Community forum<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>To get latest information on the service releases or our thoughts on the DevTest Labs, check out the <a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/devtestlab\/\">Azure DevTest Labs Team Blog<\/a> and subscribe to our <a href=\"https:\/\/azure.microsoft.com\/en-us\/updates\/?service=devtest-lab\">Service Updates<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Enjoy!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Today, we are very excited to announce the general availability of Azure DevTest Labs: your self-service sandbox environment in Azure to quickly create Dev\/Test environments while minimizing waste and controlling costs. We\u2019ve been hearing from a lot of customers about all kinds of challenges they\u2019ve been facing in their Dev\/Test environments. With the power of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":207,"featured_media":45953,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[224,226,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16555","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-azure","category-ci","category-devops"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"<p>Today, we are very excited to announce the general availability of Azure DevTest Labs: your self-service sandbox environment in Azure to quickly create Dev\/Test environments while minimizing waste and controlling costs. We\u2019ve been hearing from a lot of customers about all kinds of challenges they\u2019ve been facing in their Dev\/Test environments. With the power of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/devops\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16555","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/devops\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/devops\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/devops\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/207"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/devops\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16555"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/devops\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16555\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/devops\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/45953"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/devops\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16555"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/devops\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16555"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/devops\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16555"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}