Microsoft Azure Lab Services Migration Experience
Helping organizations re-create labs in the new and improved Azure Lab Services
Project Overview
Microsoft Azure Lab Services provides on-demand or scheduled access to pre-configured virtual machines to execute classes, professional training, conducting customer trials and demos along with performing continuous innovative experiments. Last year, in August 2022, Microsoft Azure Lab Services, released a new update for this service, with new and improved functionality. As a part of this project, the focus will be to effectively design and develop an end-to-end solution to enable Azure Lab Service’s customers to seamlessly migrate, with the least possible effort to this update of the service. Furthermore, the project also includes designing a application for bulk automation creation of labs, that would enable customers to create multiple labs in short amounts of time.
Mission
To design and develop a migration experience that enables customers to seamlessly migrate to the new and improved Azure Lab Services.
This migration experience provides an end-to-end process that enables IT administrators to migrate labs quickly, without the need for referring to service documentation and communicating with customer support teams. It enables educational institutions to utilize improved functionalities to make technical learning a meaningful experience for students.
Target User
IT Administrators at Educational Institutions
An IT administrator is responsible for providing the required infrastructure for educators to conduct classes at educational institutes. Every semester, the IT administrator provisions the necessary resources and customized machines according to the requirements of the course. After the new update was released, IT administrators face tough times in understanding the various pieces of the puzzle and assembling it together to configure labs in the new version.
User Pain Points
User research was performed with IT Administrators at the University of Washington to understand their current experience migrating labs to the latest version, as well as to uncover the various pain points in their journey.
Long Migration Turnaround Time
IT Administrators take approximately 1 month to migrate to the latest version.
Manual Configurations
IT Administrators have to manually perform system configurations across various Azure services.
Frequently Changing Lab Configurations.
Depending on semester requirements and faculty requirements, lab configurations frequently change causing delays in streamlining configurations before initiating migration.
Time-consuming Communication with Customer Service.
Depending on specific needs, IT Administrators need to raise support requests with Azure customer service to get their queries answered.
Summary of Actions
Current State Analysis of the Azure Lab Services Experience to thoroughly understand the various functionalities, user journey and technical constraints of the service. Furthermore, analyzed the dependency and interactions with various Azure Services.
User Research to uncover the pain points experienced in manually migrating to the latest version of the service.
Identification and prioritization of critical migration features for design.
Designing an end-to-end migration application high-fidelity prototype, by iteratively working with Azure Lab Services stakeholders.
Iterative system development using front-end and back-end technologies.
Quality assurance testing for identifying and resolving application issues.
Azure Lab Services Migration Application Design
Project Benefits
Reduction in Migration Turn Around Time, enabling IT administrators at educational institutes improve their operational efficiency.
Reduction in frequent references to Azure Lab Services documentation.
Reduction in frequent communications with Microsoft Azure customer support teams.
Reduction in user clicks throughout the migration process.
All these benefits empowers customers to invest time and effort in tasks that effectively matter the most.
Team
Aditya Ramnathkar
Yaxin Liu
Nikhil Navkal
Chelsea Zheng
Questions?
Contact adityaramnathkar451@gmail.com to get more information on the project