HOW TO try Windows Azure for free (without any credit card)

Update (13/June/2015) - Microsoft now lets you experience Azure App Service for up to an hour with no Azure subscription, free of charge and commitment.
                                            
                                             - 0 -       
           
Update - The free Day Pass offer ran for a while but the promo codes are no longer being offered. A credit card (won't be charged if consumption of resources is within limit) has to be provided to avail a 30-day trial of Azure. Though not as feature-rich as Azure, an alternative to Azure is AppHarbor. AppHarbor is a fully hosted .NET PaaS with a free feature-limited plan, which includes 20MB storage.

                                             - 0 -
Windows Azure, Microsoft's cloud platform offers .NET developers a great opportunity to extend their skills to this new platform. You don't have to spend a bomb to get started. While there is a free trial offer that doesn't have any upfront costs, you may have to submit your credit card.

The free Windows Azure Platform 30 Day Pass doesn't need a credit card to register. I've seen promo codes that are needed to get a Pass in various MSDN blog posts & Codeplex. The promo codes don't last forever so you may have to grab them when you see it or keeping looking at those places for new promo codes if you want it gratis.

Here are some free Azure learning resources I've found (work in progress):
Pluralsight currently has 5 Beginner & Intermediate level online training courses of totally 15 hours duration. Having received an annual subscription as a Pluralsight offer for MVPs, I've watched some of them & found them to be very helpful (will post a review shortly). Their monthly subscription price of $14.50 or roughly Rs. 700  in India for their entire course collection looks like a great deal to me.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Maven Crash Course - Learn Power Query, Power Pivot & DAX in 15 Minutes

Image
In the Maven Crash Course " Learn Power Query, Power Pivot & DAX in 15 Minutes ", Chris Dutton walks through a hypothetical business case while showcasing the power of modern Excel tools like Power Query, Power Pivot and DAX. Power Query is used to extract, transform, and load data from external sources like SQL databases, PDF and CSV files. A relational model is created to join the tables without writing a single formula. Exploratory analysis is done using Power Pivot and Data Analysis Expressions (DAX). Data Analysis Expressions is the language that we can use to define new calculated columns and measures to enhance our Data Model instead of the traditional cell formulas that we'd typically use if our data was stored in worksheets. Pivot Charts and slicers are used to design a simple interactive report that the sales managers can use to analyze revenue trends and product performance.
Read more

"Data Prep & Exploratory Data Analysis" course by Maven Analytics

Image
The Maven Analytics course on " Data Prep & Exploratory Data Analysis " by Alice Zhao is a beginner-friendly introduction to machine learning with Python. It covers the key steps of the data science workflow, including: Gathering Data Scoping a Project Modeling Data Sharing Insights Cleaning Data Exploring Data Modeling Data  Sharing Insights The presentation deck which is available as a download crisply summarizes the essential details and is a great reference to keep going back to. The course is well-suited for aspiring data scientists looking to get hands-on experience with the data prep and EDA stages of the machine learning workflow using Python and Jupyter Notebook. 
Read more

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure 2024 Generative AI Professional Course & Certification Exam (1Z0-1127-24)

Image
I was happy to learn about the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure 2024 Generative AI Professional Course with video tutorials and the Certification Exam (1Z0-1127-24) from their newsletter. I found it extremely useful, timely, and relevant. The course, with about 6 hours of videos, provided me with a comprehensive view of what it takes to build a Generative AI application. Although some parts reference OCI services, much of the course remains vendor neutral. Rohit Rahi and his team at Oracle have done a great job of structuring the beginner-friendly yet comprehensive course so well, covering all the essentials across four modules. The curriculum strikes an excellent balance between depth and accessibility.  While Gen AI output is typically non-deterministic, I was surprised to learn that they can be made completely deterministic under certain conditions. Specifically, in the OCI Gen AI service, setting the temperature parameter to 0 produces consistent, deterministic output for a g...
Read more