Microsoft Azure “Free” Services — From the Perspective of Hobbyist

I have been using Azure since 2015/2016, I guess. Witnessed the transition from Windows Azure to Microsoft Azure, from classic portal (manage.windowsazure.com) to current portal (portal.azure.com).

My learning journey with Azure started the exploration of Azure on Visual Studio Subscriptions (and I still have it now!), a subscription targeted to developers for testing purposes, and it has monthly auto-renewal $150 credit. It’s a good training for me within this constraint, as it forces me to understand the pricing structure of a particular Azure service before I provision, so I won’t exhaust my credit within the month. This mentality infused into my brain, and I’ve been factoring in the pricing structure element during the conversation with enterprise customers, so that I can make the optimal recommendation.

On personal note, as a hobbyist, I began to push the boundary of this Visual Studio Subscriptions to see what I can do as much as possible, while spending as little as possible. To my surprise, there’s quite a fair bit of things that we can enable for free, which I’m sharing how I’m using my subscriptions for personal project!

If you are new to Azure, you can sign up here and get a free account. It comes with $200 credit for 30days, and of course, the ability to use the services for free that I’m going to walk through below. Hope this will get you excite about Azure!