Earlier this year I wrote a few new articles for the Azure Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF). One of the docs I was excited about is about Azure DevTest Labs. In this article, we assume the role of the amazing fake company Contoso and look at migrating to using Azure as our location to build and test software.
Business Drivers
In the article, we assume the following drivers from the leadership team:
- Empower developers with access to DevOps tools and self-service environments.
- Give access to DevOps tools for continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines and cloud-native tools for dev/test, such as AI, machine learning, and serverless.
- Ensure governance and compliance in dev/test environments.
- Save costs by moving all dev/test environments out of the data center and no longer purchase hardware to develop software.
Migration Goals
The goals outlined in the article:
- Quickly provision development and test environments. It should take minutes, not months, to build the infrastructure that a developer needs to write or test software.
- After migration, Contoso’s dev/test environment in Azure should have enhanced capabilities over the current system on-premises.
- The operations model will move from IT-provisioned VMs to DevOps with self-service provisioning.
- Contoso wants to quickly move out of its on-premises dev/test environments.
- All developers will connect to dev/test environments remotely and securely.
Proposed architecture
In the article, we talk about the architecture and how Contoso will use Azure DevTest Labs:
- Contoso will use an Azure Dev/Test subscription to reduce costs for Azure resources. This subscription offers significant savings, including VMs that don’t incur licensing fees for Microsoft software.
- Contoso will use DevTest Labs for managing the environments. New VMs will be created in DevTest Labs to support the move to new tools for development and testing in the cloud.
- The on-premises dev/test VMs in the Contoso data center will be decommissioned after the migration is done.
- Developers and testers will have access to Windows Virtual Desktop for their workstations.
Check out the rest of the article in CAF, and let me know what you think. Also, make sure that if you are using Azure for Dev/Test you enable your subscription type to reflect these workloads. You can save a ton of money!
Thanks!
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