How to register for Microsoft Azure Free Trial account?
There are few steps to get ready (prerequisite) for Azure Free Trial Account:
- Create a New Outlook account: To prevent messing up with your work email, I suggest to create a new outlook account (it’s free!)
- Go to https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/free/
- This is where you need to specify the New outlook account that you created by clicking at the Use another account
You will then be directed to the Azure Dashboard that you can access anytime at https://portal.azure.com
That’s all for the prerequisite! Isn’t that easy enough?
Let’s move on to create subscription.
What are the things that you need to set up after login to Azure for the first time?
Create a subscription
(Without the subscription, you cannot pretty much do anything in Azure)
There are steps that you need to go through in order to register for Azure Free Trial subscription.
Step 1 Azure Free Trial registration : Personal particulars
Step 2 Azure Free Trial Registration : Credit Card particulars
Step 3 Azure Free Trial Registration : Agreement
NOTE: You free credit will expire in 30 days! So, please make full use of the credit to learn Azure within 30 days.
Create a VM (Virtual Machine)
After creating a Free Trial subscription, then it is time for you to explore Microsoft Azure.
The most common thing that we are going to start first is to create a VM.
I will go through with you in detail on how to create a VM in a different topic.
Take a look at Cost Management + Billing
There is a really nice document that Microsoft put here: (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/billing/billing-check-free-service-usage) that explains how to check free service usage.
Why is this important? You will need to be familiar with the pay-per-use model.
Since Azure Free Trial provides us with $200 credit for 30 days, we don’t want to leave our resources unutilized. Either for the whole day or a few days.
$200 credit might not last until 30 days if you keep it that way! Of course, it all depends on how we are utilizing our resources.
What can you enjoy with Azure Free Trial Account?
Although it’s a Trial version of Azure, the functions pretty much the same as pay-as-you-go Azure Subscription.
Azure Advisor
Azure Advisor is a tool that can analyze what you have been using in Azure. As Azure like all other Cloud provider is based on Pay-per-use model, this tool will be very useful to us.
Why is that? Do you remember when people are saying cloud are cheaper than on-premise?
Pay-per-use model is one of the reason. You just pay for what you are using. With a good strategy, we can efficiently make use of our resources in Azure.
Frequently Asked Questions on Microsoft Azure Free Trial
What is Azure Free Trial Account?
Azure Free trial is a free Azure Account that Microsoft offer to the customers in order to experience Microsoft Azure.
How long is the Microsoft Azure Free Trial duration?
Currently, Microsoft is giving 30 days for Azure Free Trial.
What is the Azure Free Trial Limitations?
You can currently register for Azure Free Trial but bear in mind there are some limitations to it.
What kind of limitations are we talking about? I believe it is still very generous even with those limitations.
To explain this easily, take a look at the list of some free items in the screen shot below.
Is there a list of free for 12months product or always free items?
The following products are available monthly, for free:
| PRODUCTS | PERIOD OF FREE AVAILABILITY |
| 750 hours of Azure B1S General Purpose Virtual Machines for Microsoft Windows Server | 12 months |
| 750 hours of Azure B1S General Purpose Virtual Machines for Linux | 12 months |
| 128 GB of Managed Disks as a combination of two 64 GB (P6) SSD storage, plus 1 GB snapshot and 2 million I/O operations | 12 months |
| 5 GB of LRS-Hot Blob Storage with 2 million read, 2 million write, and 2 million write/list operations | 12 months |
| 5 GB of LRS File Storage with 2 million read, 2 million list, and 2 million other file operations | 12 months |
| 250 GB of SQL Database standard S0 instance with 10 database transaction units | 12 months |
| 5 GB of Azure Cosmos DB with 400 reserved in units | 12 months |
| 15 GB of bandwidth for outbound data transfer with free unlimited inbound transfer | 12 months |
| 5 GB of bandwidth for outbound data transfer with free unlimited inbound transfer | Always free |
| 10 web, mobile, or API apps with Azure App Service with 1 GB storage | Always free |
| 1 million requests and 400,000 GBs of resource consumption with Azure Functions | Always free |
| Free Azure Container service to cluster virtual machines | Always free |
| 50,000 stored objects with Azure Active Directory with single sign-on (SSO) for 10 apps per user | Always free |
| 50,000 monthly stored users and 50,000 authentications per month with Azure Active Directory B2C | Always free |
| Free Azure Service Fabric to build microservice apps | Always free |
| First 5 users free with Visual Studio Team Services | Always free |
| Unlimited nodes (server or platform-as-a-service instance) with Application Insights and 1 GB of telemetry data included per month | Always free |
| Unlimited use of Azure DevTest Labs | Always free |
| Machine Learning with 100 modules and 1 hour per experiment with 10 GB included storage | Always free |
| Free policy assessment and recommendations with Azure Security Center | Always free |
| Unlimited recommendations and best practices with Azure Advisor | Always free |
| Free Azure IoT Hub edition includes 8,000 messages per day with 0.5 KB message meter size | Always free |
| Free public load-balanced IP with Azure Load Balancer | Always free |
| 5 free low frequency activities with Azure Data Factory | Always free |
| 50 MB storage for 10,000 hosted documents with Azure Search including 3 indexes per service | Always free |
| Free namespace and 1 million push notifications with Azure Notification Hubs | Always free |
| Unlimited Azure Batch usage for job scheduling and cluster management | Always free |
| Free 500 minutes of job run time with Azure Automation | Always free |
| Unlimited users and 5,000 catalog objects with Azure Data Catalog | Always free |
| 30,000 transactions per month processing at 20 transactions per minute with Face API | Always free |
| 5,000 transactions per month with Bing Speech API | Always free |
| Free 2 million characters included for Translator Text API | Always free |
| Free 5 GB per month analysis plus 31-day retention period with Log Analytics | Always free |
| Free Scheduler with 1 job collection, 5 jobs per collection, and 3,600 job executions | Always free |
| 50 virtual networks free with Azure Virtual Network | Always free |
| Unlimited inbound Inter-VNet data transfer | Always free |
Source : https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/free/free-account-faq/
What happens after Azure Free Trial period ends and I don’t upgrade to pay-as-you-go subscription?
After Azure Free Trial period ends, you will need to choose either to upgrade to pay-as-you-go Azure Subscription or to just not upgrade.
If you don’t upgrade at the end of 30 days or once you used up $200 credit (whichever comes first), you won’t be able to access products that you have deployed.
The product that you have deployed will be decommissioned
If I upgrade to pay-as-you-go subscription, what do I get?
Remember the list above for the product that is free for 12 months? You can access those for free and other always free products as well.
Can we register for Microsoft Azure Free Trial without credit card?
Unfortunately, we cannot register Azure Free Trial without credit card for now.
According to Microsoft, the reason why we need to use the a credit card to register is to authenticate us during the registration.