Can Azure Labs be utilized for a professional setup (non student users)?

Question

When reading about Azure Lab Setup, it exactly matches my requirement. But I am not sure if it can be utilized for a professional setup (non student users) or for production deployments? If yes how to do that and why does the official docs accentuated just Educators as users for the labs?

Answer 1

@Himanshu Nankani ,

I'll do my best to cover typical scenarios, but if I don't cover your scenario, will you please respond with more details? I'm not quite sure what you mean by "production deployments".

First, let's cover the Azure Lab Service documentation. The product with created with three personas in mind: admin, educator and student. (https://learn.microsoft.com/azure/lab-services/classroom-labs-concepts#user-profiles). Azure Lab Services was designed with education institutions in mind, so that use experience is going to be the most prominent. That's not to say you can't use Azure Lab Services for other scenarios. We have customers use Lab Services for professional trainings (https://learn.microsoft.com/azure/lab-services/classroom-labs-scenarios) and hack-a-thons (https://learn.microsoft.com/azure/lab-services/hackathon-labs).

If you think Lab Services is best for your scenario, then I recommend reading the SLA, which is available at https://azure.microsoft.com/support/legal/sla/lab-services/v1_0/.

If you mean something like hosting a website, Lab Services is not recommended for the simple reason that it's a hosted service and you don't have control over much of the underlying infrastructure. You can see details at https://learn.microsoft.com/azure/lab-services/classroom-labs-fundamentals.

If you mean something like a developer box in a production process, or an automated pipeline for creating virtual machines, there are a few options for you:

• https://learn.microsoft.com/azure/devops/pipelines/process/environments-virtual-machines?view=azure-devops
• https://github.com/marketplace/actions/build-azure-virtual-machine-image
• https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/azure-developer-community-blog/introducing-azure-deployment-environments/ba-p/3412095 (just announced service)

I know that was a lot of information and links. Hopefully, it answered your question. If not, could you describe what you are trying to accomplish in more detail?

Thanks,
Elizabeth