Pop-up labs in the cloud

With the advent of the public cloud, cheap compute resources used on a pay-as-you-go and only-pay-for-what-you-use basis, a new phenomenon is emerging. The pop-up lab.

Pop-up labs are used by Devs and IT Pros to create multiple server lab environments that are popped-up for the few hours they are needed and then popped back down again, ready to be re-ignited on a different occasion.

At the end of the day it’s just the start-up/shutdown of collections of virtual machines, but the things that make this different are that the machines live in a public cloud operator’s data-centre; like Windows Azure. If you think about it – when you need to say, replicate a problem, you only need the lab usually for a few hours, probably less than a day. Great if you’ve got a large data-centre to build the virtual environment in. But what if you don’t have the luxury/money to have such a resource at your disposal?

That’s where pop-up labs come in. They are used for dev and test purposes, for self-education/career advancement, training, problem replication and just simply getting experience with a new technology. The free Windows Azure trial subscription means you can often run pop-up labs for free. But say if you want to fire up a 2-server SharePoint farm with SQL Server and AD to replicate one of your customer’s problems: you could do that for an afternoon’s work for less than £2.

If you want to know more about this emerging phenomenon – go to this URL: https://aka.ms/Popuplabs