Azure Lab Services retires on 28 June 2027. Microsoft stopped accepting new customers on 15 July 2024. If your college runs its classroom labs on it, you need somewhere else to run them before the term that starts after that date.
This is what we know, from Microsoft's own pages, as of October 2026.
What Microsoft says to use instead
Microsoft's retirement guide says Azure Virtual Desktop, Windows 365, DevTest Labs, and Dev Box "can be used instead". Dev Box itself stopped taking new customers in November 2025 and is being folded into Windows 365.
None of those is a classroom lab product. They are virtual desktop and developer environment products. You can build labs on them, but you will be building the teacher's view, the student roster, the hour limits, and the term schedule yourself. We cover that in Microsoft's replacements for Lab Services, and why they are not a lab product.
The guide also names four partners who will run labs for you: Apporto, CloudLabs by Spektra Systems, Skillable, and Nerdio Manager for Enterprise. All four run on Azure.
What does not carry over
Three things in the retirement guide matter more than the rest:
- Storage was free. Lab Services gave each student a dedicated machine with a persistent disk, and the disk was included in the hourly price. Microsoft warns that replacements may not be as cheap for that.
- Core quotas do not transfer. Whatever vCPU quota you had, you or your new vendor will have to ask for it again.
- Your images stay yours. You keep your Azure Compute Gallery images after retirement. Most migration guides still recommend rebuilding them on the new platform rather than importing them.
The gap for small buyers
The partners are set up for large customers. A UK apprenticeship provider spending £300 to £700 a month asked on Microsoft Q&A for a replacement after every partner said they were too small. Microsoft's reply agreed that the partners "often require minimum spending".
That is the gap Hyperamplify Labs is for: small colleges, training providers, and cybersecurity programs with tens or a few hundred students, and a teacher or lab technician who sets the labs up.
What to do this term
- List what your labs actually use. Hours per student, schedules, idle shutdown, persistent disks, nested virtualization, Windows or Linux, how many students at once. Lab Services did a lot of this for you without anyone writing it down.
- Decide whether students need their work kept between sessions. It is the biggest cost difference between replacements, because a kept disk bills all month whether anyone uses it or not.
- Rebuild one image on a candidate platform and run one class on it before the spring term. Boot time and console quality are what students notice.
- Ask for quota early. Whatever platform you choose, a class of 50 starting at once needs the vCPU quota to exist first.
If you would like to talk it through, request information. We reply personally.