Azure Lab Services is Retiring: Time to Upgrade to RONIN!
Azure Lab Services is being retired, RONIN offers a smarter upgrade. Easily create and manage virtual classrooms without cloud expertise, control costs with built-in safeguards, and deploy consistent environments at scale. Flexible, secure, and built for modern teaching.
If you’ve recently heard the news that Azure Lab Services is being decommissioned, you are likely in the market for a reliable, secure, and intuitive replacement to host your virtual classrooms. Transitions like these can be daunting for educators and IT administrators, but there is a silver lining: this is the perfect opportunity not just to replace your virtual lab software, but to upgrade it.
Enter RONIN.
RONIN takes the complexity out of cloud computing, allowing educators to design virtual classrooms where custom teaching environments are easily created, replicated, and managed. If you are looking for a new home for your virtual labs, here is the "Why To" guide on making the switch to RONIN.
1. You Don't Need to be a Cloud Architect
One of the biggest hurdles in adopting cloud-based virtual labs is the sheer technical complexity. RONIN was built with simplicity in mind. The same features that help researchers easily set up secure, complex lab environments are adapted for the classroom, meaning you can provision secure virtual classrooms with no cloud architects required. Through an intuitive UI and our free desktop application, RONIN LINK, both educators and students can deploy and connect to complex applications like RStudio, Jupyter Notebooks, or full Virtual Desktops with just a few clicks.
2. Teaching Models Tailored to Your Syllabus
Every class is different. Some courses require strict, uniform environments, while others benefit from giving students hands-on experience managing cloud infrastructure. RONIN perfectly accommodates both through two core deployment models:
- Professor-Managed Classrooms: For strict control, professors can create a single RONIN project for the entire class. The professor sets a budget, builds the environment, and provisions the machines. Students never even see the cloud UI, they are simply provided with a secure key and a machine address to connect to their pre-configured workspace.
- Student-Managed Classrooms: Want your students to gain real-world cloud computing experience? You can give each student their own project with a set budget and user-level permissions. They learn how to spin up instances, manage storage, and respect resource limits, all within safe, university-defined guardrails.
3. Bulletproof Cost Management
One of the biggest fears of cloud computing in education is the dreaded runaway bill. RONIN provides a suite of helpful cost management features designed to ensure your classroom costs are completely transparent and tightly controlled:
- Smart Scheduling: Ensure student machines are only running during scheduled class times or predefined business hours. If they forget to turn them off, RONIN handles it.
- Auto-Pause: Set an auto-pause value just below your total budget amount. If a student hits this limit, their machines automatically stop, and they cannot spin up new resources until an admin intervenes.
- Budget Alerts: Both professors and students receive automated email notifications when 25%, 50%, 75%, and 100% of the budget is reached.
4. Template Once, Deploy to Everyone
Say goodbye to the days of students struggling with “it works on my machine” installation errors. With RONIN’s machine packaging feature, professors can create a single template environment. You launch a base machine, install the required software, and download all necessary datasets. Once finalised, you simply "package" that machine. Every student can then launch their own isolated clone of that exact environment.
5. Break Free from Physical Hardware Constraints
By moving your virtual labs to RONIN, your students are no longer confined to the physical hardware available in a specific campus building. Whether they are running data-intensive genomics applications, compiling heavy code, or needing GPUs for a machine learning course, RONIN taps directly into the immense power of the cloud. With AWS’s vast array of instance types, students have access to virtually unlimited computing power and the latest hardware, all from their personal laptops at home.
Ready to Upgrade Your Classroom?
The sunsetting of Azure Labs doesn’t have to be a disruption, it can be the catalyst that brings a more flexible, cost-effective, and powerful teaching tool to your institution.
RONIN opens up a new world of opportunity for professors to give students access to the latest technologies in an intuitive and highly controlled manner. Don’t settle for a basic replacement when you can have an upgrade.
Contact us today to see exactly how RONIN can seamlessly take over your virtual classroom workloads before your current Azure Labs environment is retired!