Don't Worry Azure Training Lab for $0

Kam Salisbury

Beginning or switching to coding for "the cloud" no longer means hours of effort and a small heard of old servers in the basement. You can literally have a complete cloud computing lab ready in an afternoon.

Get started;

Sign-up up for a free Azure account https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/free/

Don't worry, you are providing a credit card to prove identity. Be sure to set a $0 limit on the Pay As You Go subscription.

Add Subscriptions;

Sign-up for both free account subscription programs, which allows you to understand multiple subscriptions in the same account login, plus adds monthly credit to each subscription.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/cloudessentials

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/member-offers/vs-dev-essentials/

Don't worry, these $25 monthly credits (per subscription) are enough to learn with and do not require a credit card though you have that as an option if you want it.

Choose a Code Editor;

Never used a code editor before? Start with VScode https://code.visualstudio.com

Don't worry, Azure does not require this specific code editor.

Code, Learn, Code More;

You now have a complete Azure development lab in the cloud! The training resources at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/ are excellent and updated often.

When you are ready, your lab can be enhanced by;

Creating a free GitHub account to store and share all your awesome code projects. https://github.com/pricing when you are ready, GitHub has paid tiers with features most businesses would need.

Try a different code editor. VScode is great and extendable through free and paid plugins, however, there are editors available for all platforms that may be better suited for your coding tasks. DuckDuckGo search https://duckduckgo.com/?q=code+editor

The sky is the limit!