What is a lab, really?
Back to lab school
Before asking for the keys, read the manual: what a lab is, the four rules that are not up for negotiation, and the needs that require no lab at all. Ten minutes of reading, no detention.
A lab is a temporary environment made available to a consultant or a team for training, experimentation, a proof of concept or a demo. It comes in two forms:
- an Azure lab, in the cloud tenant dedicated to labs. You create your Resource Group and declare the lab by e-mail.
- a Proxmox lab, on-premise on the
pve-lab-clustercluster. The administrators create the Pool and the VLAN on request.
What a lab is not
Section titled “What a lab is not”- a production environment
- a durable or guaranteed storage space
- an approved place for client, personal or sensitive data
- a permanent solution without explicit approval of an extension
What doesn’t need to be a lab
Section titled “What doesn’t need to be a lab”Two common needs that get handled through a lab request even though they don’t call for one:
- an identity: users, groups and app registrations, self-service in Entra ID
- a place to share: sites, lists and libraries, self-service in SharePoint
In both cases: no cost, no request, no e-mail.
Why this site exists
Section titled “Why this site exists”The governance charters (PR-GOVCLOUDLAB-A-01 and PR-GOVLABONPREM-A-01) are thorough but dense. This portal makes them actionable: a decision assistant, rules sorted by responsibility and an e-mail generator. It doesn’t replace the charters, which remain the source of truth (see Official charters).
How to read the rules on this site
Section titled “How to read the rules on this site”Each rule carries a badge showing who is responsible for it. That is the most useful piece of information on every page: it separates what the platform will enforce on you from what nobody will do for you.
The platform or a policy applies, limits or blocks the rule.
Nothing to do: you will be blocked if you step outside the rules.
An action or a point of vigilance that is yours as the lab owner.
Do it yourself: nobody will do it for you.
Creation, checks, supervision or deletion by the administrators.
Taken care of: write to lab@qiminfo.ch if needed.
Recommended good practice, not automatically enforced.
Not blocking, but flagged in the monthly review.
A single rule can fall into two categories. A tag can be enforced by an Azure Policy while still leaving you responsible for giving it an accurate value.
Mostly want a lab, not the theory? The path starts at create my lab.