I introduced the Devtest Lab service, which is relatively easy to use. It is simple to deploy, flexible to use, and suitable for a variety of application scenarios. As mentioned before, Azure has another Lab-related service. , Which is the Lab Service to be introduced next,
In the previous introduction, it was mentioned that Lab Service is more inclined to a SaaS-based product, and the function positioning is also clear. It is for teaching purposes and does not require users to maintain the underlying computing resources. Relatively, use it. Also more concise than DevTest Lab
The following are some recommended usage scenarios on the official website:
· Provide students with virtual machine labs, which are configured completely according to the needs of the course. Provide each student with a certain amount of VM usage time for students to complete homework or personal projects.
· Set up a high-performance computing VM pool for computing-intensive or graphics-intensive research. Run the VM on demand and clean up the computer when finished.
· Move the school’s physical computer laboratory to the cloud. Automatically scale the number of VMs so that the maximum usage and cost thresholds set by the laboratory will not be exceeded when scaling.
· Quickly configure the virtual machine laboratory and host the programming marathon. When finished, click to delete the lab.
For activities like hackson, the practical dev test lab or lab service are quite suitable
Billing
In terms of billing, the billing method of Lab Service is much more complicated than that of DevTest Lab. It is no longer billed based on pure computing resources, but has its own billing logic.
The instances in the lab are virtual machines, and each instance is billed hourly according to the instance size in the table below.
The laboratory unit is the cost unit that determines the price of each instance size. The cost of each size includes a certain number of laboratory units.
For example, if there are 50 students in a classroom lab who use a small instance for 4 weeks and 10 hours a week, the cost is calculated as follows:
50 students X 40 hours/student (10 hours/week X 4 weeks) X 20 laboratory units (small instance) X $0.01/hour/lab unit = $400*
Roles
In terms of roles, lab service is mainly divided into two types: teachers and students
Usually, users (such as teachers or online trainers) create a laboratory under a laboratory account. The teacher performs the following tasks:
• Create classroom labs.
• Create virtual machines in the lab.
• Install the appropriate software on the virtual machine.
• Designate people who can access the laboratory.
• Provide students with a registration link to the laboratory
Students perform the following tasks:
• Register the laboratory using the registration link received by the laboratory user from the laboratory creator.
• Connect to the virtual machine in the lab and use it to complete classwork, assignments and projects.
use
In terms of usage, it is simpler than Devtest lab
In the creation step, the parameters that need to be specified by yourself are actually very few
Only need to specify the resource group and the deployment location
Then you can also set some connection options of the VM, such as the time of disconnection, the time of automatic deletion and opening, etc.
For users, whether they are teachers or students, when using the lab service, they are not on Azure Portal, but another independent address https://labs.azure.com/
Then use Azure account to log in, for teachers with permission, you can create a lab directly
The image and size of the virtual machine in a lab are fixed, so you must specify it when you create it
Including username and password, VM connection options, etc.
After completion, the virtual machine template will be created
After the laboratory is created, it is not immediately available. It needs to go through multiple steps such as publishing templates and inviting users.
The release of the template is actually the process of actually creating the experimental environment according to the specifications and information of the previously selected virtual machine
Then you can see the real environment in the virtual machine pool
If real students want to use the experimental environment, they need to be invited by the teacher
The invitation process is actually to send the registration link and code to the user, and the user manually completes the registration process
If the user cannot receive the email, in fact, it is possible to directly send the registration link in other ways
After the registration is complete, log in with the invited account and you can start using it!
The entire use process is basically the use process of a SaaS-based product, and there is no trace of the underlying resources behind it.