Azure DevTest Labs has been available for a while and I have found it a good way to make sure I control costs of VMs i.e. making sure they are shutdown outside office hours. However, in the past, have had a major limitation for me that they only allowed templates that contained a single VM. You could group these together but it was bit awkward.
Well at Connect() it was announced that there is now complex ARM template support. So you can now build multi-VM environment that simulate the environments you need to work on as a single unit.
Why not give it a try?