What can you do with your MSDN Azure free benefits?


All MSDN subscribers receive monthly credits for Azure services. The benefits vary according to the type of MSDN Subscription. There are so many things with a MSDN Subscription that it is easy to miss that this benefit exists.

So what can you do with these MSDN Azure free benefits?

I wish the Azure documentation answered this long back. I was happy to see a promotional web page that clearly mentioned the ways to use MSDN credits. It detected from my IP address that I'm from India and even showed me the value of the benefits in Indian Rupees.
Things you can do with $100 or Rs. 6100 per month of Azure Credits




Scott Guthrie estimated that 90 percent of MSDN subscribers would be able to cover all of their dev/test costs through the benefits without any additional charges to their company, involvement from their IT department or need for a credit card number.

I plan to compile ideas that I hear or read about on ways to put the benefits to good use:
  • Friction free creation of virtual machine based development/test environments using Windows Server, IIS, SQL as well as servers such as SharePoint or BizTalk. MSDN users can now install MSDN servers and Visual Studio software into Azure.
  • Creation of large scale environments to be used for scalability/load test scenarios.
  • Provide instances of Visual Studio workstations running in the cloud.
  • Provide a sandbox environment for QA/UAT testing.
  • Provide instances of virtual machines for the use of training / evaluation of new servers and tools.

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