Category: Hi-Tech

3 key features of Azure DevTest Labs that promotes business scalability

Do you know approximately 34% of workers prefer to work on the cloud and will seek other employment if they are compelled to return to the office?

This statistic shows how quickly things have evolved, such as how a pandemic breakout has made cloud computing the most preferred alternative for businesses and employees. According to the research, one of the main reasons why companies and employees are leveraging cloud computing is data access from anywhere.

Thus, in order to provide a cloud computing solution to developers and ease their tasks, Microsoft Azure has developed a cloud-based application-centric solution that is known as “DevTest Labs”. Let’s know in-depth about the Azure DevTest Lab solution.

Introduction to Azure DevTest Labs

Microsoft's Azure DevTest Labs tool/service aims to give a development team a suitable digital, fast, easy and lean working and developing environment. This Azure online lab is a comprehensive solution for developers that comes with everything you'll need to get started.

It allows the developing team to deploy the virtual machine with the Azure DevOps pipeline, configure the application and other elements. The cloud-based solution DevTest Laps in Azure eliminates a bundle of challenges encountered by developers in the on-premises working environment, such as unhealthy infrastructure, overhead cost, and resource-consuming process of building production.

Developers can simply add or creates their own formula and records that are using as a default property to build a VM (Virtual Machine), redefine the configuration of an environment needfully. DevTest Labs is a feature-rich tool that has the potential to bring scalability to your business. So, let’s explore those key features of Azure DevTest Labs.

Key Feature of Azure DevTest Labs That Promotes the Business Scalability

Businesses on the large portion are rapidly harnessing the benefits of the cloud that majorly includes agility, flexibility and economics. Azure DevTest Labs is a cloud-based solution built with a wide range of capabilities that assist businesses while also supporting the critical dev-test cloud environment.

Let’s discuss some prominent features of Azure DevTest labs environments that promote business scalability.

1) Key/Secret Vault

You may be required to input a variety of complicated and difficult-to-remember credentials while using Azure DevTest Lab, including the password for the Windows VM, the public SSH key for the Linux VM, the personal access token to clone, and perhaps more.

In order to make it painless for the users, Azure DevTest Laps provides a personal secret store. The user can preserve into the store with security and safety. Safe all your secret inside the key vault along with a name that has been created by the Azure for you and you can use it later.

This also helps the business and dev team to securely manage sensitive data in centralized storage, which is completely safeguarded by industry-standard algorithm, the key length and even with the hardware security module.

Different use of key vaults

Secret management
Key management
Certification management

2) Artifacts

It is one of the favourite features that help a lot to developers. DevTest Labs is a customizable element that allows you to define the action to be taken while creating VM (Virtual Machine). Once the application setup is done after the provision of VM you are able to use Artifacts.

Where you will find the Artifacts repository?

You can also use PowerShell or CLI scripts to automate the process of adding an Artifacts repository to a lab. This feature helps you in the process to create a perfectly configured VM. a perfectly configured VM.

3) Auto Start and Shut Down Schedule

This feature of DevTest Labs enables you to start and stop the Virtual Machine as per the user-defined schedule and provide insight through Azure monitoring logs, and optional emails. This makes it easier for the users to start and shut down the VM, which is a cost-effective and out of the box solution.

Auto Shut Down Policy:

Set the degree to which lab users have control over their own VM shutdown schedules. Allow users to create their own schedules or impose a forced one.

There are three choices:

User sets a schedule and can opt-out
The user creates a schedule and is unable to opt-out
The user has no control over the schedule set by the lab administrator

Auto Start:

This option is for configuring azure virtual machine autostart. Auto-start lets you start virtual computers in a lab at a pre-determined time each day. In comparison to the shutdown policy, the alternatives are more flexible.

KCS Capabilities

KCS is a worldwide IT firm that has been utilising the Microsoft Azure Cloud platform to assist its clients to achieve increased productivity, lower maintenance, and improved information flow for over two decades. Our years of experience helping organisations in migrating any aspect of their company, application, or storage operation to the Azure Cloud in a smooth manner.

KCS provides a wide range of services such as infrastructure assessment, Azure migration, Azure consulting, Azure lift and shift, data box and many more.

KCS Fulfilment

A number of organisations have already benefited from KCS' Azure services. And one of those services was supplied to a beverage firm headquartered in South Africa. We proposed an Azure SQL and Power BI integration as a solution.

KCS specialists created a robust data management solution for the clients using Power BI and Azure SQL Database. The technology can do complex analyses on large amounts of data in a matter of seconds. The adoption of Power BI made the system more user-friendly, and the customer can run analyses by simply dragging and dropping data. The Azure SQL Database connection improved data retrieval performance. We used.NET Core Web API to create APIs that will assist the system in retrieving data from Microsoft Azure Cloud.

KCS Outlook

After exploring the capabilities and features of Azure DevTest Labs, KCS strongly recommends it in order to increase business scalability and improve project and solution delivery. This Azure solution allows businesses to minimize management task and also help them to reduce the cost.