The first thing I want to do is say thank you to Michael Crump (b/t). He tweeted out this:

A while back I talked about getting started with Azure. At the time you got a year of $25 a month credit. This is no longer the case but that’s all to the better. I mean look at that list of benefits! Michael wasn’t kidding. It’s -A LOT-.

For 1 month

• $200 credit

For 12 months

• 750 hours each of Windows and Linux virtual machines.
• Two 64gb managed disks.
• 5gb blog storage.
• 5gb file storage.
• 250gb SQL Database.
• 5gb Azure Cosmos DB.
• 15gb bandwidth

Always free

• 10 Web, mobile, or API apps.
• Functions: 1,000,000 requests per month.
• Event Grid: 100,000 operations per month.
• Azure Kubernetes Service: Free
• Face API: 30,000 transactions per month.
• DevTest Labs: Free
• Active Directory B2C: 50,000 monthly stored users.
• Service Fabric: Free
• Azure DevOps: 5 users with unlimited private Git repos.
• Wow this is a long list
• If you want to read
• the rest of it you
• should follow this link
• to create your free Azure account.
• Oh, SQL Server Development edition is on the list too.
• No idea why since it’s not an Azure product.
• But hey, free!

This gives you 12 months to really dig into Azure without having to spend much if anything. This is a huge, if temporary, boost to your home lab. Just the free VMs alone means you can create a cluster and start playing with availability groups. Or a single VM and practice installing SQL. Or create an Azure SQL DB. Or, well, really almost anything.

Given how quickly things are changing I’d get started!