The first thing I want to do is say thank you to Michael Crump (b/t). He tweeted out this:
A while back I talked about getting started with Azure. At the time you got a year of $25 a month credit. This is no longer the case but that’s all to the better. I mean look at that list of benefits! Michael wasn’t kidding. It’s -A LOT-.
For 1 month
- $200 credit
For 12 months
- 750 hours each of Windows and Linux virtual machines.
- Two 64gb managed disks.
- 5gb blog storage.
- 5gb file storage.
- 250gb SQL Database.
- 5gb Azure Cosmos DB.
- 15gb bandwidth
Always free
- 10 Web, mobile, or API apps.
- Functions: 1,000,000 requests per month.
- Event Grid: 100,000 operations per month.
- Azure Kubernetes Service: Free
- Face API: 30,000 transactions per month.
- DevTest Labs: Free
- Active Directory B2C: 50,000 monthly stored users.
- Service Fabric: Free
- Azure DevOps: 5 users with unlimited private Git repos.
- Wow this is a long list
- If you want to read
- the rest of it you
- should follow this link
- to create your free Azure account.
- Oh, SQL Server Development edition is on the list too.
- No idea why since it’s not an Azure product.
- But hey, free!
This gives you 12 months to really dig into Azure without having to spend much if anything. This is a huge, if temporary, boost to your home lab. Just the free VMs alone means you can create a cluster and start playing with availability groups. Or a single VM and practice installing SQL. Or create an Azure SQL DB. Or, well, really almost anything.
Given how quickly things are changing I’d get started!