Azure DevTest Labs

Last year  Azure DevTest lab came in preview and at that moment there wasn’t that much to do with it.
I started to play again with it and I’ve created an DevTest Lab and after that a VM, so I thought to share some of the stuff that I’ve discovered and tried.

You can choose what images to be available for deployment from the Marketplace for the DevTest Lab environment that you create but you can also   add a template created by yourself by uploading an image using Powershell.

Artifact Repository contains applications that can be added to the VM when installing it: Azure Powershell, Fiddler 4, .Net Framework etc (there can be also be added other apps in the Artifcat Repository, but that’s something that I haven’t tried yet).

Also, for each DevTest Lab created a Cost thresholds can be configured, but this is currently still in preview.
When it comes to VMs there some policies that you can configure:
-Allowed VM sizes: this way you can make sure the uses won’t be able to create expensive VMs
-Maximum VMs per user and Total VMs allow on a DevTest Lab environment
-Auto shutdown and start policies for VMs
Permissions and roles can be assigned to users that are accessing a DevTest Lab and there are some predefined roles that can be assigned:
-Owner
-Contributor
-Reader
-DevTest Labs User
-User Access Administrator

If you are working for a software company, you should definitely have a look at it.

You can find more about DevTest Labs at the following link https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/devtest-lab/