How Does Azure for Students Work? 

Microsoft will provide $100 worth of Azure credit for students. Simply sign up with your education account as we do in our video demo or a Microsoft account and verify your student status.  Users must be over 16 (13+ in the US) and be in full time education.  The $100 credit is valid for 12 months and there are a whole load of free Azure resources.  Once the credits are used and the 12 months are over, if you are still a student you can sign up again.  You can also move to pay as you go and there are 55+ free services. You only pay if you you go over the monthly limits.

Do you need a credit card for Azure for Students ?

You do not need a credit card to use many of the free services but it is advisable to add your credit card details to test things like virtual networking which is essential, especially if you want to learn about infrastructure and networking.  Although virtual networks are free it is not included in the free student Azure subscriptions without adding card details. 

Other reasons are to provide access to higher SKUs for things like Web Apps which have a lot more features you can start to learn. the free tier for example does not allow for custom domains for example.  So you need to move up to Basic or Standard at least to test this out.

In our video (see below) we show an example of trying to use the virtual network as well as setting up a free SKU of Azure Web Apps.  we see the Azure web Apps will work with some limited functionality.

Azure for Students Starter

This is the name of the package when you have not added a credit card which provides access to things like free App Services, Azure Functions, Notification Hubs, Azure Database for MySQL, App Insights feature of Azure Monitor and Azure Devops Services.

Free Azure DevOps and Software

You can also access a free instance of Azure DevOps and software tools to practice working with Azure DevOps.  This with the added bonus of all the free training available on Microsoft Learn makes this a very valuable resource.

Azure Education Hub

The Education Hub which is directly available in the Azure Portal (https://portal.azure.com) provides links to the free software, deployment templates and free Azure training which is part of Microsoft Learn. We also run through this in the video demo below.  Here is a direct link to the Azure Education Hub.

Cost Optimisation and Budget Alerts

To help you get into good practices from the start our video also provides some high level tips on costs savings and how to setup budget alerts.  We can setup a budget per month and receive an alert at whatever percentage we set of that budget.  This is very important to help us keep track of costs.  In our example we setup a monthly budget of £65 and set the email alert to fire if we reach 90% of that in any month.

Free Azure Training

Microsoft provides a VAST training portal to help you learn Azure technologies in your own time.  They start from basic concepts through to advanced training and some include labs where hands-on experience can be gained.  The modules can be browsed by role, by certification, or technology.  We advise that you use a Microsoft account such as an outlook.com account to register on Microsoft Learn so it stays with you as you progress through your student life and career.  The short url for MS learn is aka.ms/learn.

What Can We NOT Do With Free Azure For Students Credits?

Some items such as 3rd party services in the Microsoft Azure Market place are not included in the free offer as well as services like ExpressRoute.

How Do I Create a Microsoft Account ?

You can create your free Microsoft Account by visiting acount.microsoft.com and scroll down to where it says “Create an account“

The Full FAQ guide from Microsoft is available here: 

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/education-hub/azure-dev-tools-teaching/program-faq#azure-for-students

Video Demonstration

See our video below where we walk through the setup and show the account being created. We will setup the Azure DevOps instance as well as create a couple of basic resources to help get you started.