As part of your training and practice, learning to use the Azure components is vital to help you attain your goals of azure certification. This does introduce potential additional costs to your learning, depending on specific requirements, you may be able to use a subscription that comes with free credit or discounted components.

Free Trial Account

Azure free account, if you have never used Azure before you could be eligible for the Azure free account. Free accounts are the ideal starting point, not only do you get $200 of credit to use within your first 30 days you also get additional products free for up to 12 months these include:

• 750 hours of Azure B1S Virtual Machines for Microsoft Windows Server
• 750 hours of Azure B1S Virtual Machines for Linux
• 2 x 64 GB (P6) SSD storage, plus 1 GB snapshot and 2 million I/O operations
• 5 GB of LRS-Hot Blob Storage with 20,000 read and 10,000 write operations
• 5 GB of LRS File Storage with 2 million read, 2 million list and 2 million other file operations
• 250 GB of SQL Database standard S0 instance with 10 database transaction units
• 5 GB of Azure Cosmos DB with 400 reserved in units
• 1,500 hours of dynamic public IP addresses
• 15 GB of bandwidth for outbound data transfer with free unlimited inbound transfer

You do need a debit or credit card to sign up, but there is a spending cap applied meaning you are not charged unless you upgrade your account.

There are some restrictions on the free trial. These are mostly around the usage of Azure Marketplace resources. Due to third parties supplying the resources you are unable to use the $200 credit towards them. Many third-party partners within the Azure Marketplace do offer a free trial or free tier allowing you to use them still but not all. In those cases, having a pay as you go subscription or an attached credit card would be required.

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