Azure Test Environment for Development and Testing

Having a robust test environment is crucial for developers to ensure their applications are stable and function as expected. Azure provides a scalable and secure test environment that allows developers to test their applications in a production-like setting.

Azure offers a range of services that can be used to create a test environment, including virtual machines, containers, and Azure DevOps. These services can be easily scaled up or down to meet the needs of the development team.

With Azure's test environment, developers can test their applications in a secure and isolated environment, reducing the risk of errors and downtime. This allows for faster and more reliable testing, which is essential for delivering high-quality applications.

Azure's test environment also supports continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines, enabling developers to automate testing and deployment processes.

Optimizing Development Environments is crucial for delivering quality products, applications, and services. You can empower your team to quickly provision dev/test and pre-production environments using purpose-built, managed developer services like Azure DevTest Labs, GitHub Codespaces, and Azure Virtual Desktop.

Azure DevTest Labs allows you to easily manage and optimize dev/test environments, tenants, and subscriptions without sacrificing governance, cost controls, or security. This helps you maintain control over pre-production test environments by shifting to Azure.

To maintain environments, it's essential to manage configuration changes consistently. You can do this by re-deploying environments to a known state at any time using Azure Resource Manager templates. This way, you can easily re-deploy the environments back to a known state.

Re-deployment is achieved by running the same commands used in the initial deployment, but replacing the deployment name. For example, if you used "Deployment1" initially, you can re-deploy using "Deployment2". This ensures that all resources from the template exist in the resource group again.

Here are some benefits of using Azure Resource Manager templates for re-deployment:

By following these best practices, you can optimize your development environments and improve the efficiency of your engineering teams.

You can quickly provision dev/test environments in Azure, empowering your team to deliver quality products and applications.

Azure DevTest Labs is a purpose-built, managed developer service that allows you to easily manage and optimize dev/test environments, tenants, and subscriptions without sacrificing governance, cost controls, or security.

Azure Virtual Desktop simplifies the management experience of Windows virtual machines (VMs) and enables you to deploy and scale your dev/test environments with ease.

You can use reusable custom templates in Azure DevTest Labs to reproduce test environments, making it easy to quickly provision and manage team-specific environments across your organization.

Here are some key Azure services for development:

These services help you provide fast, easy, and lean dev/test environments in Azure, as mentioned in the comparison article on Azure App Service, Cloud Services, and Virtual Machines.

Testing and deployment is a crucial part of the Azure test environment. You can configure your infrastructure for development and testing of a standard PaaS-style system, a microservices-based system, and a standard IaaS-based SaaS system. This allows you to create a testing platform as a service (PaaS) solution, a microservices solution, and an infrastructure as a service (IaaS) solution.

To test SharePoint farm, you can enable a small-scale deployment using a single Microsoft Entra ID instance, SQL, and SharePoint resources. This is a great way to test a SharePoint farm in a controlled environment. You can also learn how Azure Dev/Test can help your engineering teams quickly and remotely create dev/test environments.

Maintaining environments is an essential part of the testing and deployment process. You can change the environments by deleting resources and re-deploying them using Azure Resource Manager templates. This allows you to easily re-deploy environments back to a known state at any time, making it easier to troubleshoot and resolve issues.

Testing deployment is a crucial step in the testing and deployment process. It involves configuring your infrastructure for development and testing of various systems, such as PaaS-style systems, microservices-based systems, and IaaS-based SaaS systems.

To optimize your development and test environments on Azure, you can use purpose-built, managed developer services like Azure DevTest Labs, GitHub Codespaces, and Azure Virtual Desktop. These services enable you to quickly provision dev/test and pre-production environments to deliver quality products, applications, and services.

Large test suites can take very long to execute, but you can run a preliminary test run with the --only-changed flag to get a faster feedback loop and slightly lower CI consumption while working on Pull Requests.

Azure Pipelines support running containerized jobs, and you can use our Docker container with Azure Pipelines support or Command line tools to install all necessary dependencies. For running the Playwright tests, use this pipeline task:

To maintain environments, you can use Azure Resource Manager templates to create, maintain, and delete development and test environments. This can help you easily re-deploy the environments back to a known state at any time.

You can upload the playwright report folder with Azure Pipelines, which will make the pipeline run fail if any of the playwright tests fail.

To integrate test results with Azure DevOps, use the PublishTestResults task.

The JUnit reporter needs to be configured accordingly via playwright.config.ts.

Cost control is a major concern when it comes to managing Azure test environments.

Pipelines can freely create instances, leading to increased resource usage and costs.

Limiting developers to one instance per microservice through namespace conventions can help control costs.

In a Kubernetes world, namespaces can be used to limit instances per microservice and a maximum of one staging instance.

For Azure PaaS, manipulating resource group names as parameter overrides can achieve similar cost control.

However, this may require changing existing ARM templates or Terraform scripts, which can be tedious and error-prone.

In a Kubernetes world, pipelines can deploy instances under a namespace, which limits a developer to one Dev/Test instance per-microservice and a maximum of one Staging Instance.

This approach ensures that the number of resources under the account increases at a controlled rate, preventing large bills to the public cloud provider.

If using Azure PaaS, one would have to manipulate the resource group names as parameter overrides in the ARM template, which can be tedious and error-prone, especially for complex multi-VM templates.

By following conventions similar to those mentioned for Kubernetes namespaces, it's possible to limit a developer to one Dev/Test instance per-microservice and a maximum of one Staging instance, but this might require changing existing ARM templates or Terraform Scripts.

You can save big on dev/test workloads in the cloud with the Azure Dev/Test offer.

This offer is designed to help you reduce costs on development and testing environments.

Explore the Azure Dev/Test offer and see how you can save on dev/test workloads in the cloud.

Optimizing your development and test environments on Azure is a game-changer for teams. Azure DevTest Labs, GitHub Codespaces, and Azure Virtual Desktop are purpose-built, managed developer services that enable quick provisioning of dev/test and pre-production environments without sacrificing governance, cost controls, or security.

You can easily manage and optimize dev/test environments, tenants, and subscriptions with Azure Dev/Test. This allows engineering teams to quickly and remotely create dev/test environments.

Maintaining environments is crucial to avoid unnecessary troubleshooting and problem resolution during the application development cycle. Throughout development, configuration of Azure resources in different environments may be inconsistently changed intentionally or accidentally.

Inconsistent changes to Azure resources in different environments can cause unnecessary troubleshooting and problem resolution during the application development cycle.

To avoid this, it's essential to maintain a consistent state across all environments. This can be achieved by regularly re-deploying environments to a known state using Azure Resource Manager templates.

When changes are made to the configuration of Azure resources, it's easy to get out of sync. This is where parameter files come in handy. By using parameter files, you can create unique configurations for each environment, ensuring that resources are set up correctly.

Parameter files allow you to define different settings for each environment, such as the sku and requestedServiceObjectiveName for Azure Web App hosting plans. In the Pre-Production parameters file, these parameters were added, whereas they weren't added in the Development and Test parameters files.

Here's a comparison of the default values and parameter file values for the Pre-Production environment:

By using parameter files and regularly re-deploying environments, you can maintain a consistent state across all environments, reducing the risk of unnecessary troubleshooting and problem resolution.

In an Azure test environment, security and access are crucial to protect sensitive data and ensure compliance. The default domain accounts created during deployment provide a solid foundation for this.

The AOSServiceUser account is used to run the Microsoft Dynamics AX Object Server on AOS-virtual machines. This account is a key part of the environment's infrastructure.

To manage access, you'll find the passwords for these domain accounts on the Cloud-hosted environments page in Lifecycle Services. This ensures that administrators can securely access the environment without compromising security.

Here is a list of the default domain accounts created during deployment:

Domain accounts are crucial for the smooth operation of your Dynamics AX 2012 R3 environment. They are used to run various services and perform specific tasks.

The following domain accounts are created when you deploy the environment: AOSServiceUser, SQLServiceUser, DynamicsInstallUser, SPServiceUser, BCProxyUser, and AXServiceUser.

AOSServiceUser is used to run the Microsoft Dynamics AX Object Server on AOS-virtual machines. SQLServiceUser is used to run SQL Server Analysis Services on SQL-virtual machines.

DynamicsInstallUser is used to install AX 2012 R3, while SPServiceUser is used to run various services on EP-virtual machines, including AppFabric and SharePoint Search Host Controller. BCProxyUser is used as the Business Connector proxy.

AXServiceUser is used to run Microsoft Dynamics AX Data Import/Export Framework Services and Microsoft Dynamics ERP RapidStart Connector on AOS-virtual machines, as well as Microsoft Dynamics AX for Retail Commerce Data Exchange Async Client on CLI-virtual machines.

Here's a summary of the domain accounts and their descriptions:

You can find the passwords for these domain accounts on the Cloud-hosted environments page in Lifecycle Services.

Local Administrator Accounts are a crucial aspect of security and access in virtual machines. Each virtual machine you deploy has a local administrator account.

This account is named builtinaxlocaladmin. The passwords for the local administrator accounts are displayed on the Cloud-hosted environments page in Lifecycle Services.

In an Azure test environment, it's essential to configure your infrastructure for development and testing of a microservices-based system.

You can use Azure DevOps to manage and automate your testing process, making it easier to deploy and test your microservices solutions.

For development and testing, Azure provides a robust set of tools and features that can be leveraged to streamline your workflow.

To configure your infrastructure for development and testing, you can use Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) to deploy and manage your microservices.

Azure DevOps provides a comprehensive set of tools for testing and deployment, including continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines.

With Azure DevOps, you can automate your testing process and ensure that your microservices are thoroughly tested before deployment.

To test your microservices, you can use Azure's dev/test deployment for testing microservices solutions, which allows you to configure your infrastructure for development and testing.

Planning your resource use is a crucial step in setting up an Azure test environment. To do this, you need to decide which Azure resources your application will include. This might involve building your application as an Azure Web App with an Azure SQL Database.

You should also consider what service level requirements your application will meet, such as availability, security, and scale. These requirements will help you determine the right resources for your application.

Here are some Azure resources you might want to consider for your test environment:

Remember to choose resources that align with your application's service level requirements.

To create a sandbox environment in Azure, you can create multiple subscriptions under a single cloud account, each with its own resource group and logical collection of resources. This is suggested by the Azure Architecture Blueprints.

Within each subscription, you can use Azure Resource Groups to create logical collections of virtual machines, storage accounts, virtual networks, web apps, databases, and/or database servers. Users typically group related resources for an application, divided into production and non-production groups, but can subdivide further as needed.

A resource group is only a logical container into which Azure resources are deployed and managed, so you need to manipulate resource names to ensure uniqueness within each scope. This can be done by prefixing or suffixing the resource group name with the logged-in user's name.

In a Kubernetes world, this is achieved using namespaces, which provide a scope for names. However, whether this paradigm would work in a complex Multi-VM ARM Template scenario is still being explored.

Here are some key points to consider when scoping resource names:

After connecting to your Azure subscription, you'll need to specify the region where your AX 2012 R3 environment will be deployed. This is a crucial step, as it will determine the datacenter location of your test environment.

To do this, select the region that is closest to you, as this will minimize latency and ensure optimal performance.

You can only connect a project to one Azure subscription, so make sure to identify the correct subscription before proceeding. If you make a mistake, you'll need to delete the project and start over.

Now that you've set up your Azure resources, it's time to think about how to manage them effectively. Delegate administrative control to different resources in each environment by assigning Microsoft Azure AD groups or users to specific roles that have the ability to perform a subset of operations on Azure resources.

Assigning the right roles is crucial to maintain a smooth workflow. Assign tags to the resource groups for each environment and/or the individual resources. This will help you organize resources for billing or management, and can be especially helpful when you need to track costs.

Tags can be a game-changer for large-scale resource management. You might add an "Environment" tag to your resource groups and set its value to correspond to your environment names. This will give you a clear overview of which resources belong to which environment.

To stay on top of things, make sure to monitor alerts and billing for resource group resources in the Azure Preview Portal. This will help you catch any issues before they become major problems.

Connecting the project to your Azure subscription is a crucial step in deploying an AX 2012 R3 environment.

You can only connect a project to one Azure subscription, so make sure to identify which subscription you want to use before proceeding. If you have multiple subscriptions, choose the one you need.

To connect the project, start by clicking Cloud-hosted environments. This will display the Cloud-hosted environments page.

Next, click the Microsoft Azure setup panel, which should be displayed on the side of the screen. If it's not visible, click Microsoft Azure settings to activate it.

Now, enter your Azure subscription ID to proceed. If you need to find your subscription ID, you'll need to click Next and then download a management certificate.

The management certificate is used to enable Lifecycle Services to communicate with Azure on your behalf. By default, the certificate is saved to the Downloads folder on your computer and is named LifecycleServicesDeployment.cer.

After downloading the certificate, go back to the browser displaying the Microsoft Azure setup panel and click Next. Then, select the region closest to you, as the AX 2012 R3 environment will be deployed to a datacenter in this region.

Finally, click Connect to complete the connection process.