By Roman Fattakhov

August 12, 2020
Last updated on August 16, 2022

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An In-Depth Review of the Azure Free Trial

The competition for the public cloud marketplace is fierce among Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). AWS, having launched four years earlier than Azure, is ahead in terms of market share and revenue, for now. However, Azure is slowly becoming a strong contender for position one with AWS with its flagship apps targeting developers and IT pros. In this review, we differentiate each of the three public cloud providers, as well as an in-depth view of the azure free trial.

Microsoft Azure

Microsoft Azure offers a range of IaaS services, including compute, storage, networking, and analytics. Azure boasts of more global regions than any other cloud provider. As a cloud provider, Microsoft Azure is available in more than 60 regions and 140 countries. As such, it provides organizations the flexibility they require when deploying applications while preserving data residency.

You can experiment with Azure’s IaaS products by signing up for an Azure free trial account explained earlier. Microsoft employs a pay-as-you-go model when charging customers—meaning you only pay for the resources you have used each month. When you sign up for Azure, you have access to Azure products such as VMs, SQL databases, App Services, and Kubernetes, among others.

Microsoft Azure Support Options

Besides Azure products, you’ll also have access to third-party vendor apps whose cost varies depending on the subscription model and infrastructure usage fees. Microsoft offers five different customer support options for its Azure products: Basic, Developer, Standard, Professional Direct, and Premium. Each option varies in terms of price, scope, and support mechanisms, as shown in the table below:

Azure Services

Microsoft Azure has over 600 services, some of which are listed below:

• Azure Active Directory: You have a maximum of 50,000 authentications available for free per month.
• Azure App Services: You have a maximum of 10 websites, mobile, or API apps created for you at no cost.
• Azure Cosmos DB: You have a maximum of 500 GB of storage capacity with 400 request units per second availed to you at no cost per month.
• Azure DevOps: You have up to 5 users, each with limitless Git Repos availed at no cost.
• Azure Cosmos DB: You access up to 400 RU/s of provisioned throughput.
• Event Grid: You have access up to 1,00,000 operations per month.
• Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS): You have access to AKS at no cost.
• DevTest Labs: You have access to DevTest Labs at no cost.

There are a number of features that Azure offers even beyond the first free 12 months. Depending on the availability and region, you can use 400 RU/s of Azure Cosmos DB, and 10 web, mobile, or API apps. You also get 1,000,000 requests per month to process events on a serverless manner.

Microsoft Azure also gives 100,000 operations per month, and services like Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), DevTest Labs, and Service Fabric for free. Also free are 5 Azure DevOps users, Security Center, and unlimited personalized recommendations of Azure best practices. You also get free load balancer, 5 low frequency activities for data services, 10,000 document searches, 1,000,000 push notifications, free batch computing, 500 minutes of job runtime, unlimited data catalog, 50 virtual networks, inbound Inter-VNET data transfer, 5 GB of bandwidth, free Visual Studio Code, free Machine Learning server, and free SQL Server 2019 Developer Edition.

What is Azure Free Trial?

The Azure free tier is a free service from Microsoft that allows users and companies alike to experience mainstream cloud computing products. Microsoft is providing Azure as a free trial to allow organizations to test-drive its popular services. The Azure free tier may not be sufficient for full production work.

However, it has enough resources to get you started with some of the popular Azure IaaS services, including Virtual Machines (VMs), managed disks, SQL databases, Kubernetes, and AI-as-a-Service, among others. The offerings from Microsoft Azure fall into two basic tiers: “limited-time for free” and “always free.”

Signing Up to the Microsoft Azure Free Trial

When you sign up for the Azure account, you automatically have access to more than 25 popular products that are free for 12 months. Plus, you get a US$200 credit that you can spend for the first 30 days upon signing up. When the 30-day spending period lapses, you’ll continue to enjoy those products, but only after upgrading your account to pay-as-you-go. And, as long as you’re staying within the service quantities included for free services, you won’t pay anything.

In this regard, the US$200 credit acts as a spending limit within the first 30 days. When you use resources beyond the freemium products and quantities within this time, Microsoft automatically deducts that consumption from your US$200 credit. In instances where you deplete the US$200 credit or 30-day period lapses (whichever comes first), you have to upgrade your account to pay-as-you-go.

How to Register for the Azure Free Trial

1. Visit the Azure Home Page first.
2. In the upper right corner, click on Free Azure Account.
3. Choose “Start Free.”
4. Enter your email address and password to log in or create a Microsoft account.
5. Type your country or region and birth date, then click the next button.
6. Type the email address’s verification code and click the next button.
7. Fill out the captcha on your screen, then click the next button.
8. A new window will open with the Azure Sign-up page. Name, region, phone number, and email address must be entered. Note: For both creating a Microsoft account and signing up for Azure, you should use the same email address.
9. Enter the supplied verification code after selecting Text Me or Call Me to confirm your phone number.
10. Type in your payment information. Make sure you have a credit card that accepts Master Card, American Express, or Visa, and international payments must be enabled.
11. Review the Terms and Conditions before pressing “Sign Up.”
12. Your free Microsoft Azure account has been successfully created, and you now have a $200 lump sum amount.
13. In the upper right corner of the screen, choose Portal. Your browser will change to the Azure site.
14. You must switch to the Pay As You Go membership model once your free credit has run out.

AWS

AWS launched in 2006 as an internal infrastructure within Amazon to handle its online retail operations. Just like Azure, AWS uses a pay-as-you-go pricing model where organizations and individuals can scale their compute, storage, and performance as needed. If you decide to prepay in full or sign up for more than one year of usage commitments, then you may qualify for discounted prices.

However, if you just want to experiment with Amazon’s IaaS products, then you can explore AWS free tier. With AWS free tier, you have access to up to 60 IaaS products that are offered in three options: “always free,” “12-months free”, and “trials.” The free tier has similar restrictions as the Azure free trial, including the 12 months and limited functionalities on core products like EC2 (Elastic Compute) and S3 storage.

Some of the products that you can access with the AWS free tier include:

• Amazon DynamoDB: You get up to 25 GB of storage capacity with 25 units of read and write capacity per month at no cost.
• AWS CodeBuild: You get up to 100 build minutes per month for free.
• AWS CodeCommit: You get up to 5 users, each with 50 GB per month of storage capacity coupled with 10,000 Git requests.
• AWS CodePipeline: You get a maximum of one active pipeline per month at no cost.
• AWS Lambda: You get up to one million requests and 3.2 million seconds of computing time per month.
• Amazon Glacier: You have up to 10 GB of data that you can retrieve at no cost from Amazon’s data storage service.
• Amazon RDS: You have access to MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, and Oracle provided you supply a license and use a single-AZ db.t2.micro instance.
• AWS Step Functions: You have access to up 4,000 state transitions per month at no cost.

GCP

GCP launched in 2008 as a suite of cloud services running on the same infrastructure that Google uses for its high-end products such as Gmail, Google Search, and YouTube. In 2017, Google introduced a free tier service for companies with modest IaaS usage needs. When you sign up for a GCP free tier, you automatically have access to more than 20 popular products.

Unlike the Azure free trial that provides you with US$200 to spend for the first 30 days, Google provides you US$300 to spend on its IaaS products during your free trial period. Below are some services you can access with the GCP free tier:

• Google App Engine: You can access up to 5GB of storage capacity and execute up to 28 front-end and 9 back-end instances per day.
• Google BigQuery: You have access to up to 10GB of storage capacity and 1 TB of querying space per month.
• Google Cloud Functions: You have access to up to 2 million invocations for both background and HTTP requests per month.
• Google Cloud Source Repositories: You have access to up to 5 users, with each user getting 50 GB of storage capacity.
• Google Compute Engine: You have access to 1 f1-micro VM available for free if you live in the U.S. regions.
• Google Cloud Storage: You have access to up to 5 GBs of regional storage if you reside in the US and 1 GB of outbound data that is limited depending on the Compute Engine.

Parallels RAS Supports Different Cloud Platforms

Parallels® Remote Application Server supports on-premises, public, and hybrid cloud deployments. With Parallels RAS you can:

• Leverage different approaches while reducing the total cost of ownership (TCO).
• Mix and match different workloads such as Remote Desktop Session Host (RDSH), virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), hypervisors, hyperconverged infrastructures, and cloud providers.
• Integrate with Azure Virtual Desktop to manage and unify all virtual workloads from a centralized console, including Windows 10 Enterprise multi-session.
• Easily meet business requirements with infrastructure auto-scaling and workforce mobility.

Integrating Azure Virtual Desktop with Parallels RAS gives you better manageability, flexibility, and auto-scaling features. It allows you to easily automate administrative activities, support and deliver legacy apps, access cutting-edge features, and do all of this from a centralized console with ease.

Download your 30-day trial of Parallels RAS today! Experience the power of virtualization in multi-cloud environments.

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