When Microsoft announced that Azure Lab Services would retire, it pointed customers at four partners. For a university with thousands of students and a procurement team, that works. For a college with 30 students in a networking course, it often does not.
A UK apprenticeship provider spending a few hundred pounds a month asked Microsoft for help after every partner told them they were too small. Microsoft's answer agreed that the partners often require minimum spending. That thread is why Hyperamplify Labs exists.
Who it is for
- The teacher who runs a term: one class, one image, a start date and an end date, and students who need a machine that works on a Chromebook.
- The lab technician who builds the image. At a small college that is often the same person as the teacher. At a larger one it is someone in IT who does not want to learn a new cloud console.
- The cybersecurity or Windows Server program that needs Kali, a domain controller, or a hypervisor inside the student's machine, and no internet on the class network.
- The training provider with a budget in the hundreds of dollars a month, not a six-figure contract.
What we believe
Labs should be priced like labs. Classes run in bursts around a course, then nothing. We charge for the hours machines run, with a $49 monthly minimum, so a student who never opens the lab costs nothing.
The controls that matter are the boring ones. Hours per student with a hard stop. A term end date that ends every machine. A shutdown when nobody is using the machine. Reset to the image. These are what Lab Services users ask for first, and what generic virtual desktop products leave out.
Staff should build their own images. Every evaluation checklist we have read asks whether the college's own staff can build and update the lab image. In Hyperamplify Labs they can, in the browser, and every saved version is kept so a class never changes in the middle of a term.
Small customers deserve a real product, not a cut-down one. The same queue, the same isolation, and the same console whether you have 10 students or 1,000.
How we work with colleges
Every college starts with a 30-minute onboarding call. We go through your labs, your students, and your term dates, and set up your first lab from there. What colleges tell us decides what we add next.
We chose Google Cloud for the machines. The reasons are in Why we chose Google Cloud.
If that sounds like your college, get started, or ask us anything first.
Keith, founder