Migrate from Azure Lab Services Retiring June 2027¶
Azure Lab Services retires on 28 June 2027. RosettaHub has run labs for universities since 2016, before Azure Lab Services existed.
Azure Lab Services Retirement¶
Microsoft announced on 18 July 2024 that Azure Lab Services will be retired on 28 June 2027. New customers can no longer sign up. Existing customers keep access until the retirement date, after which lab accounts, lab plans and labs are no longer available.
The 2026 to 2027 academic year is the last one Azure Lab Services covers: courses that start in autumn 2027 need a new home before the summer.
Microsoft points customers to Azure Virtual Desktop, Windows 365, Azure DevTest Labs and Microsoft Dev Box. Each covers part of the job, but none is a managed classroom lab with templates, schedules and per-student limits in one place.
RosettaHub keeps every lab and adds what Azure Lab Services never had: a budget per student that holds, work that survives a stop, billing at your own cloud rates and sharing across courses and institutions.
Why RosettaHub¶
RosettaHub is a multi-cloud platform that has been delivering virtual labs to universities since 2016. It supports virtual machines, containers, Kubernetes clusters, Big Data clusters, HPC clusters, and any infrastructure based on IaC templates (Terraform, CloudFormation), as well as sandboxed federated access to native cloud consoles and tools.
Migrating from Azure Lab Services to RosettaHub gives your institution:
- More flexibility: any instance type, any image size, any cloud provider
- Lower costs: billing at your own cloud rates, with no margin on infrastructure
- Better user experience: single portal, no publishing delays, stop/start VMs without data loss
- Multi-cloud freedom: AWS, Azure, Google Cloud and Alibaba Cloud from one platform
Feature Comparison¶
Platform Scope¶
| Capability | Azure Lab Services | RosettaHub |
|---|---|---|
| Description | Managed Azure-only service for provisioning templated VMs for hands-on labs | Multi-cloud SaaS platform for VMs, containers, Kubernetes, Big Data, HPC, IaC templates, and sandboxed cloud console access |
| Cloud support | Azure only | AWS, Azure, Google Cloud and Alibaba Cloud |
| IDE support | No | Yes: all IDEs |
| Notebook support | No | Yes: Jupyter, RStudio, Zeppelin, and more |
| Container-based labs | No | Yes: start from container images with Jupyter, RStudio, VS Code pre-installed |
| Custom container images | No | Yes: build and share custom Docker images |
| Direct sandboxed access to cloud services | No | Yes: federated console access with sandbox enforcement |
| Real-time collaboration | No | Yes: share formations, images, and storage with users, groups, and organizations |
Flexibility¶
| Capability | Azure Lab Services | RosettaHub |
|---|---|---|
| Instance types | Limited to 8 fixed configurations | Any instance type from any supported cloud provider |
| Image size limit | 128 GB | No limit |
| Stop and restart VMs | A stopped lab VM can lose the work on its disk | Yes: VMs can be stopped and restarted without data loss |
| Spot/preemptible instances | No | Yes: up to 90% cheaper than on-demand, with automatic spot recovery |
| Cloud storage integration | Manual configuration only | Auto-mount dedicated object or file storage per student in the lab setup |
| Run labs from shared images | No: must create a new image first | Yes: launch directly from shared formations without publishing |
Cost and Billing¶
| Capability | Azure Lab Services | RosettaHub |
|---|---|---|
| Billing granularity | By the full minute, in lab units that bundle compute, disk and network | Billed by your cloud provider at your own rates: per second for most machines on AWS and Google Cloud, per minute on Azure |
| Infrastructure cost | Lab prices above the underlying VM cost | Labs run at your own cloud rates: no margin on infrastructure |
| License model | Pay-as-you-go: license costs scale with lab usage hours | See pricing |
| Cost tracking | Costs appear with Azure billing, with a delay of about a day | Costs tracked in near real time per student, course and cloud account |
| Hard budget limits | No: managers can set maximum lab hours, but no spend cap | Yes: at the limit, launches are blocked and running machines stop, with their disks kept |
Cost Examples¶
The table below compares Azure Lab Services hourly rates with equivalent AWS on-demand instances run through RosettaHub, at list prices. RosettaHub adds no margin on infrastructure: you pay the cloud provider directly.
| Configuration | Azure Lab Services | RosettaHub (AWS) | Saving |
|---|---|---|---|
| Small: 2 cores, 3.5 GB RAM | $0.20/hr | $0.046/hr (t3.medium) | 77% |
| Medium: 4 cores, 7 GB RAM | $0.42/hr | $0.092/hr (t3.large) | 78% |
| Medium (nested): 4 cores, 16 GB RAM | $0.55/hr | $0.184/hr (t3.xlarge) | 67% |
| Large: 8 cores, 16 GB RAM | $0.70/hr | $0.232/hr (m7a.xlarge) | 67% |
| Large (nested): 8 cores, 32 GB RAM | $0.84/hr | $0.333/hr (t3.2xlarge) | 60% |
| Small GPU (compute): 6 cores, 56 GB RAM | $1.39/hr | $0.79/hr (g3s.xlarge) | 43% |
| Small GPU (visualization): 6 cores, 56 GB RAM | $1.60/hr | $1.00/hr (g5.xlarge) | 38% |
| Medium GPU (visualization): 12 cores, 112 GB RAM | $4.08/hr | $1.81/hr (g5.4xlarge) | 56% |
Spot instances for even greater savings
With RosettaHub's spot instance support, these costs can be reduced further: AWS prices Spot capacity at up to 90% below on-demand.
Cost Controls¶
| Capability | Azure Lab Services | RosettaHub |
|---|---|---|
| Automated shutdown on idle | Yes | Yes |
| Scheduled shutdowns | Yes | Yes |
| Stop idle VMs | Yes (terminates, loses data) | Yes (stops, preserves data: VM can be restarted) |
| Spot instances | No | Yes, with three automatic recovery modes: snapshot disk, hibernate, or launch replacement VM |
| Per-student hard budgets | No | Yes: at every level of the organization hierarchy, checked in near real time |
User Experience¶
| Capability | Azure Lab Services | RosettaHub |
|---|---|---|
| Single management portal | No: administrators switch between the Azure portal (lab plans) and the Azure Lab portal (labs) | Yes: one portal for everything |
| Time to first lab | ~15 minutes: labs must be "published" (image creation) before students can use them | Immediate: labs launch directly, no publishing step required |
| Quota management | Labs share a resource group quota; educators often hit limits when scaling | Each user gets their own budget and RosettaHub limits on machine numbers and sizes |
| User/group/organization management | No organizational mapping: users managed per-lab via Active Directory | Full organization hierarchy: departments, courses, groups with delegated management |
| Share lab templates | No | Yes: share formations with users, groups, or entire organizations in a few clicks |
| Share labs between organizations | No | Yes: cross-organizational sharing via URLs or marketplaces |
| Invite users to labs | Yes | Yes |
| Lab schedules | Yes | Yes |
Spot Instance Recovery¶
RosettaHub's spot instance support is particularly relevant for education, where labs are often fault-tolerant and the savings of up to 90% can dramatically stretch a department's budget. When a cloud provider reclaims a spot instance, RosettaHub automatically handles the interruption with three recovery modes:
- Snapshot on Termination: automatically creates an image of the VM's disk before it is reclaimed, preserving all student work
- Hibernate: saves the full machine state (memory + disk) so the VM resumes exactly where the student left off when capacity returns
- Auto-replace: automatically launches a replacement VM with similar characteristics
Stay on Azure or Move¶
Retirement forces a change of service, not a change of cloud. You decide where each course runs.
- Stay on Azure: RosettaHub runs labs in your own Azure subscriptions. Your agreement and credits with Microsoft stay as they are, and students get the same kind of machines they use today, with a budget each and one portal for every course.
- Move some or all of it: run a course on AWS or Google Cloud when the pricing, credits or services suit it better, from the same portal. Templates, budgets, schedules and sign-in work the same way on each cloud.
Migration Path¶
Move course by course, and keep Azure Lab Services running until every course has moved. Start with one course in parallel during the spring 2027 term, then move the rest over the summer.
Step 1: Set Up Your RosettaHub Organization¶
- Register your organization on RosettaHub
- Connect one or more cloud accounts (AWS, Azure, GCP, or others)
- Configure your organization hierarchy to match your institutional structure (departments, courses, groups)
- Set budgets at each level
Step 2: Recreate Your Labs as Formations¶
For each Azure Lab Services lab plan:
- Create a formation that matches the lab's software stack. Choose the formation type that fits:
- Docker Formation for container-based labs (Jupyter, RStudio, VS Code)
- Cloud Formation for custom VM images
- Virtual Lab Formation for full desktop environments (Linux or Windows)
- Test the formation by launching it yourself
- Snapshot any customizations as reusable images
Start from existing formations
RosettaHub's marketplace includes pre-built formations for common lab types. Clone one and customize it rather than building from scratch. See the workspace and lab tutorials for step-by-step guides.
Step 3: Onboard Students¶
- Configure SSO integration with your institutional identity provider
- Register students individually or in batch via Excel upload
- Share formations with the appropriate course organizations
- Students log in and launch labs with a single click: no cloud accounts or credentials needed
Step 4: Decommission Azure Lab Services¶
Once your labs are running on RosettaHub:
- Export any data or images from Azure Lab Services that you need to preserve
- Stop and delete Azure lab plans
- Do this before the retirement date, 28 June 2027
Next Steps¶
- For Education: full overview of RosettaCloud capabilities
- Getting Started: set up your RosettaHub account
- Formations: learn how to create lab templates
- Tutorials: step-by-step walkthroughs for workspaces, labs, and more
Need help migrating?
Contact us for a guided migration from Azure Lab Services. We can help you design your formation templates, configure your organization hierarchy, and onboard your first course.