Leveraing free Azure benefits to build and experiment Machine Learning skills
Cloud opens up many opprtunities not just for businesses but also for individuals such as developers, architects, machine learning enthusiasts, data science engineers and data scientist.
This article discusses how one can use free Azure benefits with MSDN subscription. MSDN Subscriptions are available to developers and are made available as part of licensing by software development organisation. As a developer I have found MSDN Azure Benefits is the best benefit provided by #Microsoft. You dont have to pay any money in any way. I have used this benefit(and bragged as well) mostly to provision VM’s and run my Machine Development projects on the cloud. VM easily lets anyone provision General Purpose or Compute Optimised VM’s.
Coming straight to the point. Steps to leverage this simple and are as follows:
- Open MSDN Benefits Page and navigate to Azure Benefits as shown below
- Press the activate button
- You will be taken to sign-up page and asked to provide some personal details.
- You can also sign up with a Pay as You Go account.
- Once done you will be taken to Azure Portal(https://portal.azure.com) as shown below, navigate to subscription
- Status ‘Active’ tells you are good to go.
- You can click on ‘Subscriptions’ and ‘Quotas & Usage’ to check what you will be entitled to do with this Azure subscription.
- Once you have checked your quotas, you are free to spin any services. Microsoft will keep them running till your quotas are not burns out. You can check ‘Billing’ to see how much you are burning as your services run on Azure platform.
- Detailed steps for creating a Virtual Machine is decribed here. You can also spin them using Azure CLI or Azure Powershell CLI clients or using Azure Devops services(but they are advanced usecases) and will be better if you want to deal with workload for your organisations.
- One good practice you may adopt is to spin a service, use it and then delete the services. Make sure you delete ‘Resource Group’ instead of deleting individual services. As it will delete everything you may have provisioned.
Similar benefits are available from Google for its GCP platform and by Amazon for its AWS platform. For both of them you will be required to register with a credit card.
