I am a student and signed up for a free account, which I used up. My next course, AZ-104, needs to use Azure again, but I have no credit left, just pay as you.

Question

I am a veteran going through the Vocational Residency program (VRE) through the Veteran's Administration. I started my courses with Azure Fundamentals and now am taking the AZ-104 administration program. If I had known that I would need to use Azure again I would have signed up for the free account during this portion of my program. But I didn't. I now have no way to follow along with the course. I tried to sign up for a student account but apparently LearnKey is a online for profit school.

Is there any way to contact sales? Anyway to start a new subscription to continue my school? I still have to complete the Administrator portion and the Security portion. SO we are talking about 2-3 months left of school.

Are there any labs, sandboxes, that I can use to get myself more familiar with azure?

Answer 1

Hi,

You still have your Azure Free account, correct? The way it works is, first 30 days you have $200 credit to use, then after that it switches to Pay-As-You-Go, however, there are still services you can use for free for another 11 months after the 30 first days has ended. You have to stick to the free services in order to avoid any charges.

In terms of the AZ-104 learning path here on Learn, you can use free sandbox subscription to complete most of the exercises. There are some where you will need your Pay-As-You-Go account, but the exercise will either be free or minimal cost.

Note that the sandbox aka "Concierge" subscription is different than your Azure Free account.

If you learn how to keep your costs down, you can do a TON of learning/practice with your paid Azure account while keeping the monthly cost down to, say, under $10/$20 per month. The other thing to learn is to set up alerts for when your charges go above certain thresholds as well as to manually check your subscription each day to see if it says you are incurring charges.

For the security portion of your studies I'm not sure what exactly they will cover (in your course) so it's hard for me to say if you would need to spend any significant money on that. There are strategies you can use for that as well like taking advantage of the Free EMS E5 trial at the right moment. The "right moment" being right before you are going to study and do exercises that require some of the higher licenses.

-TP