How to start with Azure at no cost? Where to learn and practice Azure? Which subscription is the best for me? Are there any services for free to use? I’m preparing for certification, are there any labs I can practice on? Those are typical questions asked by a lot of IT specialists every day. This article puts anyone on the right track.

Intro

Starting in Azure these days is a lot of fun and a great investment in everyone’s careers. With tremendous number of articles, videos, books and podcasts it might be confusing as to what is the best way to start. This article will cover available resources that I would recommend after 5 years of continuous learning.

This article will also cover what types of subscriptions are available to learn and develop on the platform.

Azure for FREE for everyone!

Contrary to what people think Azure has quite few services that can used for free, until some monthly quota is reached. Those services allow anyone to get started without investing anything in the platform. Services on this list are free regardless of what subscription type does anyone have.

Management and Governance

Services for automation and orchestration of processes and tasks.

Automation 500 minutes of script execution with 744 watcher hours . Usually this is enough for small automation tasks in many projects.

with . Usually this is enough for small automation tasks in many projects. Documentation

Pricing

Web, API and Mobile

Services for web, API and mobile application hosting and management

Function Apps 1,000,000 requests and consume 400,000 GB-s of memory for processing.

and for processing. Documentation

Pricing

App Service F1 which allows for hosting up to 10 applications (web, mobile or API apps). While free tier has a lot of limitations like only 60 minutes of CPU per day and 1 GB of memory and storage . It allows everyone to experience and test the platform for free. It could be enough for very small application.

which allows for hosting up to 10 applications (web, mobile or API apps). While free tier has a lot of limitations like . It allows everyone to experience and test the platform for free. It could be enough for very small application. Documentation

Pricing

Notification Hubs 1,000,000 notifications .

. Documentation

Pricing

SignalR 20 concurrent connections per unit , 20,000 messages per day and 1 free unit .

, and . Documentation

Pricing

Search Services

Services allowing to index context for searching purposes

Search 50 MB of storage and 3 indexes per service .

and . Documentation

Pricing

Data

Services for data and asset management

Cosmos Database 5 GB of Azure Cosmos database with 400 Request Units per second (RU/s) .

. Documentation

Pricing

Data Catalog 5,000 catalog objects and unlimited number of users .

and . Documentation

Pricing

Messaging and event routing

Services for pub/sub and real time message communication.

Event Grid 100,000 operations . That is around 3300 events per day, which is enough for most applications.

. That is around 3300 events per day, which is enough for most applications. Documentation

Pricing

IoT Hub 8,000 messages per day at 0.5 KB message size .

. Documentation

Pricing

Monitoring

Services for monitoring applications and azure resources.

Application Insights 5 GB of data per month and retain this for 90 days .

and retain this for . Documentation

Pricing

Log Analytics 5 GB of data per month and data retention for 31 days .

and data retention for . Documentation

Pricing

AI and Machine Learning

Azure services for analysis of images, text, context etc.

Face API 30,000 transactions per month with limit of 20 transactions per minute .

with limit of . Documentation

Pricing

Text Translator API 2,000,000 characters of data .

. Documentation

Pricing

Identity Management

Services for centralized identity management.

Azure Active Directory 500,000 objects and 10 apps registered per user . Note that default quota is 50,000 and to increase it, a support request is required.

and . Note that default quota is and to increase it, a support request is required. Documentation

Pricing

Active Directory B2C 50,000 authentications per month .

. Documentation

Pricing

Other

Other Azure limits that offer free grants

Bandwidth 5 GB of outbound and unlimited inbound data. Outbound is any traffic coming from (upload) Azure Datacenter and Inbound is all incoming traffic (download).

and data. Outbound is any traffic coming from (upload) Azure Datacenter and Inbound is all incoming traffic (download). Pricing

Azure DevOps 5 free user licenses , 2 GB of artifacts , Unlimited private Git repositories , 1 Free Microsoft-hosted CI/CD , 1 Free Self-Hosted CI/CD .

, , , , . Documentation

Pricing

Azure Subscriptions

Buying Azure really means buying Azure Subscription. A subscription is simply said an agreement with Microsoft that you pay for. There are several types of subscriptions but only free allow for free usage with limited or no restrictions.

Azure Free*

When buying Azure for the first time in Pay as you Go model everyone is given 12 services free for a year with 200$ credit for first 30 days. Allowing for extended Azure use for free.

This is in addition to list of above services with free quota grants.

A debit cards or credit card is required to sign up

There is a spending limit of 200$ and if exceeded a notification email will be sent prompting to remove spending limit, if not removed no charges will be applied and all services will be stopped

For Azure Free you can sign up HERE.

Every month Azure Free grants

Linux Virtual Machine 750 hours of B1s Linux Virtual Machine .

. Documentation

Pricing

Windows Virtual Machine 750 hours of B1s Windows Virtual Machine .

. Documentation

Pricing

Managed Disks Two SSD drives with (2) of 64GB storage .

. Documentation

Pricing

Blob Storage 5 GB of hot LRS blob storage .

. Documentation

Pricing

File Storage 5 GB of LRS file storage .

. Documentation

Pricing

Cosmos Database

EDIT: [After recent update Cosmos DB this is now FREE TIER](https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/updates/azure-cosmos-db-free-tier-is-now-available/?WT.mc_id=AZ-MVP-5003556), not just 12 months

SQL Database

Bandwidth

Visual Studio Professional subscriber or Test Visual Studio Professional subscriber can change their Pay as you Go subscription to 0059P or 0060P offer.

Every month this subscription grants

50$ monthly credit to spend on Azure services.

Considering how many free services there are this is already a lot to play around with every month with no investment.

Click here to activate

MSDN subscriber can change their Pay as you Go subscription to 0062P offer.

Every month this subscription grants

100$ monthly credit to spend on Azure services.

Click here to activate

Visual Studio Enterprise subscriber can change their Pay as you Go subscription to 0063P offer.

Every month this subscription grants

150$ monthly credit to spend on Azure services.

Cool thing about this offer is that if you are part of the Microsoft Partner Network (MPN) you will be granted 5 of those license for your organization for free for non-revenue based activities. This means you have 150$ (130 EUR) every month to learn and experiment with Azure.

Also, if you will continue to grow and get silver and gold competencies you can increase this up to 75 licenses for your company. This means 11,250$ per month for 75 users, which means 135,000$ a year to learn Azure completely free!

Click here to activate

Lastly, if you cooperate with Microsoft you might want to check with your local partner if you are eligible to for Microsoft Azure Sponsorship offer (0036P). This offer is simply pre-paid Azure subscription which you can spend to develop Azure solutions. This is great offer usually given to startups.

Every month this subscription grants

X$ of credit to spend on Azure services.

Click here to activate

Learning Azure

Anyone who finally decided to start learning Azure quickly finds out that there is tremendous amount of knowledge available to hand. There is so many books, videos, podcasts, webinars and blogs. Some services are paid some are free. With this many way to learn is it actually very hard to decide where to start.

Even though this article focuses on no investment I will prioritize best “value for money” services because everyone’s time also costs. So, if there is a 10$ training but delivers much better quality than free one in shorter time, then it should be everyone’s choice to go for. Spend extra time on something more productive, or just enjoy free time.

Documentation (aka. MSDN)

Happily, the best learning service of all is also free. This is Microsoft’s documentation (MSDN). I can’t stress enough how good it really is. It has probably over 80% questions you might have about Azure.

Just a few examples of what this documentation has

Description of every single service in Azure

Use cases of Azure Services

Samples and scenarios thoroughly explained

Pricing information

Detailed description for every programming language

Long step by step tutorials

Even videos for some services

Good references

Some very important sites are

Azure subscription and service limits, quotas, and constraints pretty much any service in public cloud has some limitations. Everyone should always read on the limitations of the service they are currently using.

pretty much any service in public cloud has some limitations. Everyone should always read on the limitations of the service they are currently using. Azure Architecture Center - When planning an architecture this is a great resource of knowledge. I always advise that people should check if their application is already on the list of reference architectures.

- When planning an architecture this is a great resource of knowledge. I always advise that people should check if their application is already on the list of reference architectures. Azure Application Architecture Guide - Description of structured guide to designing Azure application.

- Description of structured guide to designing Azure application. Azure Reference Architectures - List of reference architectures for each scenario/service in Azure. Don’t design from scratch. Always check this page.

- List of reference architectures for each scenario/service in Azure. Don’t design from scratch. Always check this page. Cloud Design Patterns - There are some designing patterns that should always be followed when creating Azure applications. This article explains each one of them with diagrams.

Hands on Labs

Learning is not only reading and watching but also practicing. Even before buying Azure Subscription everyone can start practicing Azure for free with some limitations. Microsoft’s hands on Labs is a great place to do so. At the time of writing there are 39 labs prepared for Azure. Each lab gives you limited time (2 hours) access to Azure and tasks to perform.

This is a great way to start for free. Only requirement is Microsoft Live ID account which you can set up for free at Live.com

By Navigating to Self-paced labs and typing Azure you are ready to go.

Online Courses

This is usually the hardest choice when starting to learn Azure. With great number of online services like Pluralsight, Udemy, Cloud Guru, Linux Academy or many others, people often forget that there are also free alternatives which are not any worse. Heck… I will even go as far as to say that there are plenty of free courses that are much better than paid ones.

Just don’t get me wrong here. There is also good number of good courses on those sites by great trainers. I just don’t think they are a MUST when learning Azure. I also have some good ones that I like on those sites.

But when it comes to free Microsoft recently released fantastic site called Azure Learn. This site is full of hundreds of hours of videos from all aspects of Azure. They even give you sandbox environment to practice some of the topics for free.

I personally use this site often when learning new services, I also recommend anyone at my company to start with Azure Fundamentals training. Which is awesome source of knowledge for anyone who is just starting.

Code Samples

Developers will always have their hands full, but thanks to Microsoft there is plenty of samples available for Azure on their Github. Just by typing Azure Github Samples in google we are presented with plentiful of options.

The best sites are

Azure Samples - plenty of Azure samples from Microsoft teams

Azure QuickStart Templates - hundreds of Azure ARM Template samples for Azure resource deployments

Certifications

One thing I can say about certifications themselves, is that they should not be the primary goal. They can be very specific so best way to look at them is to verify your skillset rather than aim to be your first goal. In my opinion only Azure Fundamentals is well rounded, so that I can serve is roadmap for learning.

See all role-based Certifications

Certification Labs

Anyone who is preparing for Microsoft Azure certifications will be happy to find out that there is also Microsoft Learning Github repository. This repository consists of most exams with practice labs that are part of the certification. Just download the code and follow through. This is also quite often updated which is another undervalued aspect of this.

List of recommended certification labs

Conclusion

Microsoft did pretty good job delivering huge source of knowledge and samples for Azure. Making sure that information is available, but what is most important also up to date. Anyone can quickly notice that I did not recommend the books. This is mostly due to fact that, the time it takes to write and publish the book is so long that usually services in Azure could already change multiple times. The only books for cloud that I recommend are about principles of cloud development rather than specific technology.

In the end those are just my impressions after learning Azure for over 5 years now. I will see what future will bring, but I’m very happy with the resources available for every single one of us.

Hope this is will be a help for anyone starting their career with Azure.