Forum Discussion
Suggestions for a replacement solution
We are a small UK provider delivering IT apprenticeships and "Free Courses For Jobs". We have been using Azure Labs for a number of years to host instructional labs for our learners. We have found it to be of huge benefit to our learners in terms of allowing them to develop their IT Support and Engineering skills further by putting their knowledge into practice. The platform has been ideal for us, and we are experiencing difficulties finding an alternative solution. DevTest Labs lacks a lot of the functionality we need (the ability to limit learners to a number of hours use of a particular lab vm for example). We have approached the Microsoft recommended partners, however they have all but said we are too small to be of commercial interest -our current Azure Lab spend varies from around £300pm to circa £700 per month. Wondering if any other providers have found themselves in a similar situation and if they have found any viable solutions? All suggestions welcome.
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We have had a similar issue with providing practical IT training in a controlled environment. One thing that helped us was looking for platforms that allow you to create temporary lab environments and automatically shut them down after a set period, rather than paying for a VM to stay available all the time.
The important part for us was being able to give learners enough hands-on time without giving them unrestricted access. I would also compare the total cost based on actual learner hours rather than just the monthly VM price.
Hopefully Microsoft or one of the partners eventually offers a smaller-provider option, because the use case for training providers seems quite different from a typical business deployment.
