Azure Dev/Test guide for beginners

Azure Dev/Test Labs provides developers and testers a self-service sandbox environment to quickly create Dev/Test environments while minimizing waste and controlling costs

Actually, there are many ways to use Azure for Testing and development purposes one of them is to use Visual studio subscription which it will gave you 12 months of free use with 150$ monthly for free! but for organization which they want to deploy a testing/development environments on azure and to apply some kind of automation on these resources azure provide us a way to achieve that thru Azure Dev/Test.

Azure Dev/Test Labs is a service provided by Microsoft Azure which provides functionality for managing environments that contain Azure Virtual Machines. It helps developers and testers to quickly create environments in Azure whilst minimizing waste and controlling cost. Developers can also use artifacts to quickly deploy and configure applications. By using custom images and formulas, developers can save virtual machines (VMs) as templates, and easily reproduce them across the team. Dev/Test Labs also offers several configurable policies that lab administrators can use to reduce waste and manage a team’s environments

Use cases:
Azure Dev/Test Labs makes it easy to provide Virtual Machine Images that you can reuse within your team for development and testing.

1. For individuals with Monthly Azure credits for Visual Studio subscribers up-to 150$ credit
2. For Teams (Enterprise Agreement customers): Enterprise Dev/Test and Always billed to the Enterprise Agreement
3. For Teams (all other customers): Pay-As-You-Go Dev/Test with Credit card billing

Key Features:

• VM auto-startup and auto-shutdown times
• Maximum number of VMs per lab and per user
• Allowed VM sizes
• Apply artifacts
• Quickly provision development and test environments
  
• Minimize waste with quotas and policies
• Works with your CI/CD tools
• Access to Dev/Test images in the Gallery, including Windows 8.1 and Windows 10
• Special lower Dev/Test rates on Windows Virtual Machines, Cloud Services, SQL Database, HDInsight, App Service and Logic Apps
• Additional savings with Reservations for one-year or three-year commitment on VMs and Azure SQL Database
• Same great EA rates on other Azure services
• Centralized management via the Azure Enterprise Portal
• No separate payment—just use the funds already on your Enterprise Agreement

Learn how to use Azure Dev/Test Labs with 5-minute quickstart tutorials and documentation.

Getting started

• Open the Azure Portal
  
• Click “Create a resource”
• Search for “DevTest Labs”
  
• Click Create
• Enter the parameters like name, resource group, location etc
  
• Create the DevTest Lab
  

After that you can start provisioning the resources such as VM and you can select the image/template and for sure you don't have to pay for any licenses here such as SQL or Windows!

Finally, Azure Dev/Test Labs is an Azure service that lets you quickly create environments in Azure while minimizing waste and controlling costs. Dev/Test Labs is useful any time you require dev/test environments and want to reproduce them quickly or manage them by using cost-saving policies. Dev/Test Labs provides a lot of benefits in creating, configuring, and managing developer and test environments in the cloud