How to build an army of testers in the cloud – Need for a Virtual Dev/Test Environment

Need for a Virtual Dev/Test Environment – How to build an army of testers in the cloud

In the current business scenario, migrating your business-critical data to the cloud has become more of a necessity than a matter of choice for companies looking to increase traffic to their websites and applications, expanding their geographical boundaries or just aiming at creating a robust infrastructure. There are many of companies who have made the business decision of migration to the cloud and created success stories.

Azure DevTest Labs is a service that Microsoft Azure provides. This service provides functionality for managing environments that contain Azure Virtual Machines. DevTest Labs does not cost any more than the cost of the virtual machines that you are using.

Azure DevTest Labs makes it easy to provide Virtual Machine Images that you can reuse within your team for development and testing.

It also enables you to manage costs by setting things like:

• Maximum number of VMs per lab and per user
• Allowed VM sizes
• VM auto-startup and auto-shutdown times

Benefits of cloud migration offered by Azure Dev/Test Lab to support your application

For over two decades companies of all sizes have relied on the Windows Server and SQL Server to carry their business-critical workload. In the quest for Digital transformation companies choose to migrate their on premises MS SQL Server data and applications to the cloud.

However, migration to the cloud is a crucial decision that poses its own challenges and there must be a proper strategy to successfully implement this business initiative. Companies need to ascertain their environment; their interdependencies and what applications can be relatively difficult to migrate to the cloud.

All said and done, every enterprise poses a few constraints unique to their business environment like budget issues, politics, culture and market pressure that define its decision-making that involves migrating legacy systems/data/applications to the cloud as this will have a long-standing impact on its operations.

Data security is perceived as one of the greatest challenges by business leaders when they are considering moving their legacy systems to the cloud. They are concerned about moving data from a physical server they can touch and feel to the cloud.

Microsoft Azure Dev/Test Lab backed by a strong global team of more than 3,500 cybersecurity experts supported by operational best practices happens to be the cloud platform that offers a technology that assesses potential threats and vulnerabilities provides an around-the-clock consistent hybrid cloud platform.

Need for a virtual Dev/Test environment

In the process of developing scalable, robust applications organizations need to offer different kind of environments to its developers and testers to deliver a sustainable and pervasive software application. While this is one of the crucial steps in application development it can cost organizations a great deal in terms of the cost, time and resource. This has led to the need for a customizable solution that helps create a wide array of virtual application development and testing environments. The Azure DevTest Labs is a service offered  by Microsoft AZURE which allows simulating  environments that comprises of  Azure Virtual Machines.

Companies can subscribe to this service and help its developers and testers to quickly create environments in Azure, while reducing waste and regulating costs. The inbuilt artefacts in Azure Dev/Test Labs can be quickly deployed and configured to develop applications. It allows developers to use custom images and formulas and save virtual machines (VMs) as templates and just share across their teams. Additionally, the several configurable policies offered by DevTest Labs helps administrators to minimize wastage of time and effort.

With a variety of configurable security options providing the agility to customize security that meets the meet the specific requirements of your companies applications Microsoft Azure Dev/Test Labs can best serve as the best option if your company is considering cloud migration.

The Use of Azure Dev/Test Lab for Training

By subscribing to the Azure Dev/Test lab you can create an effective virtual lab to offer hands on training to each new resource in your team. You can control the training environment by predefining policies so that the training environments (VM) are identical for each trainee, it can be shared amongst the training group and is available to them just when they need it.  The Azure dev/Test lab offers features that allow you to automate lab creation, include custom settings, create a Resource Manager template allowing you to reuse identical labs again and again.

Leveraging the Azure Dev/Test Lab benefit for Test Environment

The implementation of various possible scenarios is the key to the creation of a virtual testing environment. The Azure Dev/Test Labs can be successfully used to host machines to testers allowing them to test the latest version of the application by provisioning multiple testing agents and several possible scenarios. At the same time, as stated earlier, administrators can control costs by allocating just enough number of VMs needed for the testers.

Again, Azure DevTest Labs Enables developers to quickly provision their development machines on demand. They can do so under Windows or Linux environments by making use of the built in, reusable templates and artefacts provided by Azure Dev/Test Labs. The Dev/Test Lab also allows developers to readily customize their development machines if need arises. In this case too, the administrators have the full control to allot just enough (VMs) machines that are needed by the developers and shut down those that are not in need thus regulating the cost of development of the product.

Azure Dev/Test Labs: The Security aspect

Data security and privacy are of paramount importance when dealing with crucial business information. Microsoft Azure protects business and personal information by defining user identities and credentials plus control access. You may choose to offer  role-based access control (RBAC) to assign permissions to users, groups, and applications at a certain scope. There is a wide array of best practices that govern the security aspect in Microsoft Azure and companies may choose to stick to any one or a combination of those available depending on their desired level of data security.

To Conclude

Azure DevTest Lab is very useful for developers and testers.Azure DevTest Labs is an Azure service that allows business the agility to rapidly create virtual environments /scenarios in Azure while minimizing waste and controlling costs. DevTest Labs is   a user friendly highly customizable service which can be deployed at an instance whenever there is a need for dev or test environments, which can be replicated quickly, and managed by pre-defined cost-saving policies.IT operations can use it to enable a self-service environment where developers and testers can create their own environment quickly, with minimal restrictions, whilst being cost-effective. It can even be used to automate test processes.

Thus, DevTest Labs can be an organization’s Go-To service to create, configure, and manage developer and test environments in the cloud. It removes a lot of friction in the overall software development process.To know more contact us at info@anarsolutions.com

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