A recent blog post stated that Blockchain as a Service (BaaS) is now available on Microsoft Azure DevTest Labs – a service that helps developers and testers to create environments in Azure while minimizing waste and cutting the costs.

“DevTest Labs for Blockchain as a Service helps developers and testers to quickly create virtual machines in Azure to deploy and test their blockchain applications. You can easily provision Windows and Linux machines using reusable templates while minimizing waste and controlling cost,” the online post stated.

The post by Lee Stott from Microsoft said that developers and testers can easily integrate their deployment pipeline with DevTest Labs to provision on-demand environments. They can scale-up load testing by provisioning multiple test agents, and create pre-provisioned environments for training and demos.

In order to get started, developers can search for the keyword ‘blockchain’ where Blockchain Labs will appear in the list of available resources. After which, they can select ‘Create’ and fill in their lab details. Developers and testers can then select from a wide range of blockchain artifacts to create their own private, permissioned, public or consortium blockchain labs. They can then use their choice of open source stacks and third party offerings to get started.

The post has further detailed the procedure for setting up Blockchain as a Service (BaaS) hosted on Azure that includes signing in to Azure subscription, creating a new DevTest Lab instance, connecting to an Artifact Repository among others.

“Blockchain is becoming a very interesting are and crossing many business verticals PokitDok and their vision for blockchain in healthcare called DokChain both UCL and Imperial in the UK have developed specific blockchain institutes so I expect to see lots more exciting opportunities around blockchain over the next few months,” Lee Stott​ stated.