Tier 1 Microsoft managed VMs will be removed, Extended

Submitted by Nathan Clouse on 10/12/20.

Last modified:

10/12/20

Microsoft will begin removing RDP from Tier 1 environments and the environments soon after that.

Adri├á Ariste has a great post on this topic that you should read before continuing but I wanted to cover a few other scenarios along with some resources. We'll skip the preamble and just assume that Microsoft Managed T1 environments are basically gone as of right now. What's next?

Adri├á's post covers using it as a build server and a dev server but what if you're using it for....

Interactive Testing

It's possible you have your branches and environments configured so the Microsoft Managed T1, MMT1 for the rest of this article, as an area for interactive integrated test. This could be for many reasons but more than likely due a lot of customizations and the need for a pre-UAT area to make sure everything was merged/pulled correctly. This could be a project with 10+ active developers. This is more than likely an outlier scenario but if this applies to you, you'll have to create an Azure hosted Dev VM to continue using an environment in this way. It can be configured to do daily builds of the latest code. See Resources below.

Integration Testing

Similar to the last scenario, you may have an integration heavy project and its nice to have the MMT1 environment simply to handle automated testing for integrations that have pre-built test cases. Again, this is no real story for this and you'll have to move those to either UAT or spin up a dev VM. This can be especially troublesome as some CI/CD pipelines backed by Git may have quite a few test suites to run in a given day and we'd have to wait while a dev VM powers on to service those requests. If using C# and oData, you could have a build for each commit and PR in a day just to ensure the quality bar for the repo, depending that is configured for the integrating app repo.

Something Else - ATL, SysTest, RSAT, etc

Same as everything else: Move whatever it is you are doing to UAT or spin up a dev VM to handle the request, whatever it may be.

But Do I have Other Options?

Yes - you could use an on prem build server, either for the short or long term, depending on your project needs now or in the future. To learn more about that, look at this post. However, Environment Images only last a year so plan on redoing that environment once a year from an Image from MSFT. You also have to manually do all management of this machine. It is not connected to LCS at all.