Microsoft Azure Trail Account and Free Services

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I have seen a lot of confusion in folks that are new to Microsoft Azure Cloud world about what services are free and how to best utilize trail subscription and free services so I thought to put it into an article here.

In a nutshell, Microsoft Azure provides free trial account that has:

  1. $200 credit to spend for the first month on all services
  2. 12 months of free services
  3. Always free services
To register a free trial account you need to have a credit card (debit cards won't work) and provide its details to at the time of registration (Azure will run a test transaction of $1 but don't worry they will revert it immediately after transaction is successful). This gives you a subscription to the trial account. You can also see it under your portals subscription section.

Now here is something that people often miss out, once you activate MS Azure Free Trial you get $200 to spend just for the 1 month and after that trial subscription expires. To avail free services you need to subscribe to a Subscription plan (most likely Pay-as-you-Go as it doesn't charge upfront). I don't know why Microsoft Azure didn't clearly on how to access free services on trial account description page or why free service page is it not pinned to favorites on the portal by default, but anyway. 

Most people are scared that they might not be charged for using free services but you don't need to be worried as I will show you how you can check if a service is free and how much quota is available to use. 

You can see the details of Azure trial account here.



Below here, you can see the services that are free to use for 12 months (provided you have upgraded to Pay-As-You-Go subscription). It includes Linux and Windows VMs of B1s size, two manged Disks of 64 GB each,  5 GB of Blob Storage, 5 GB of File Storage, 250 GB of SQL Database (wow! sounds great!), 5GB space for Azure Cosmos DB and 15 GB out-bound networking Bandwidth for data transfer. This is really cool! Although it does not include any services of production grade but it's good enough to learn about the Microsoft Azure Cloud Platform.


Below here, you can see the services that are free to use forever and there are so many of them. It includes 10 App Service Plans (for creating Azure managed PaaS of Web, mobile and Api apps), Azure functions, Azure Kubernetes services (AKS), Face API, Dev-Test Labs, Azure Active Directory,  AD B2C, Azure Service Fabric, Azure DevOps 5 users limited, Azure ML Studio, Security Center, Azure Advisor to assist in Azure best practices.


Along with that other free services are Microsoft IoT Hub with 8000 messages per day, Load Balancer, Data Factory,  Search service 10,000 documents, Notification Hub with 1M push notifications, Batch service, Automation 500 minutes, Data Catalog, Translator Text API, Upto 50 Virtual Networks, Inter-VNet data transfer, Bandwidth of 5GB and free Azure Machine Learning namespace.

In the image below, you can clearly see the instruction as I mentioned earlier.


Now I will show you how you can access MS Azure Free services available for 1 Year. Login to Azure portal. Then search for Free Services from the top search bar


Or search Free Services in All Services menu in left navigation bar.


Once you click Free Services, you see all free services available as shown below. Lets create a Linux Virtual Machine of B1S size.


First select or create a resource group. Enter a valid name for the virtual machine. Select appropriate region where you get lowest latency. I am going to select Ubuntu 16.04 with B1S size vm (its the only option you have for free vms). Next select authentication type, for this article I am using password authentication but best practice is to use SSH private key with password then click next. 


I am setting up an inbound traffic rule and opening SSH port 22 (you should not leave a port open for your production VM and if there is a need to SSH into VM you should configure restricted known IP addresses that you will be using to SSH the VM). Next setup is to set any tags with the VM, I am not using tags for now and skipping the step.


The final step is where all the settings are validated. From here click Create.



After a short time the VM is ready and with that some other resources  like network interface and a public ip as shown below. Click on Go to resource.


Here we can see the public ip that we need to SSH into the vm. 


I am using a very popular tool Putty to SSH login into the VM


It prompts for username and password where you need to enter the credentials you set on Azure portal. Now we can do anything we want here, like setup a web server, a DB, an ETL tool or any other service we are interested in.


Last thing I want to mention here is that we can see the free services usage from Subscription > Pay-as-you-Go > Overview under Free services for 12 months section as shown below.


That's it! Hope it clears what you services you can use for free in Azure with free Trial account. Thanks!

Comments

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