About 12 months free azure resources

Question

Dears,

on my free time I am teaching some basic IT skills for children's (13~16 years old)

soon I will like to start with some basics on SOs and SQL, so each boy/girl should have its own environment, which of course we will help to create and so on. You can imagine, at this context, trying avoid costs, and the nuance of small cents is important.

I read:

• 128 GB of Managed Disks as a combination of two 64 GB (P6) SSD storage, plus 1 GB snapshot and 2 million I/O operations
• 750 hours of Azure B1S General Purpose Virtual Machines for Microsoft Windows Server
• 750 hours of Azure B1S General Purpose Virtual Machines for Linux
• 250 GB of SQL Database standard S0 instance with 10 database transaction units
• and so on...

I try within a fresh Azure account, and I can not manage to have two free resources:

On VMs : I got to configure them with the processing power fits the selected category, but not the hard disk (those goes to cost)

On SQL:
no idea how to get those free resources, try with different combinations (Standard S0: 10 DTUs / Basic) and all goes against cost

Is that possible?
to get those resource really free
(if small cents will always apply, is also acceptable, but then we will need to setup all payments things, and so on, just very unconfortable)

Answer 1

First of all, congratulations on your efforts, I think MS should give some bonus to projects like that. Regarding the free services, You really get them free. But you should do it under the Azure portal, at the free services section. Type free services in the search box and you see a link to the section. Under the free services section, you'll find all the services that are free. Some hints that I discovered from myself and are not well documented from Azure help :

• There are 2 VM's under the free services, 1 Linux and 1 Windows, use the link and all the configuration from that setup. Do not change anything. The VMs will be generated and will not be charged during the 750 hours period or 12 months whatever expires first. Be careful, this is not much. After that period they will charge the price that you saw prior to the VM creation. I recommend using one at a time, expire one first, and then use the other. And use auto-shutdown at 7 or 8 PM and then start it manually when you need it.
• Regarding SQL do the same. There is a 250 GB link in free services, go from there. Do not change anything, I was charged a 0,01 amount for Azure APP service which I don't care but I think you can also complain if it's the case. Pls, check the cost management section after you created the service. Don't use the sample data when creating the DB. Let it plain. It's possible to set up an alert when you are about to hit the threshold but then it charges 0,10 cents for the alert. As you are going just to study purposes, 250GB is a lot of data so you can manage it quite easily.

So That's it. After the first 30 days trial, you have to plan carefully every step in Azure because the free could have some other cost embedded. I think MS could improve the subscription services because today everyone is under the same rules and you know, there are big corps, medium corps, small corps, the "individual corp", and the personal individual, who does not want to make any profit at all. All these people will not have the same usage of the system and MS could take into consideration, as it did with Windows.

Answer 2

Updating and clearing my last findings :

1- 750 Hours of VM is per month during the first 12 months of your subscription. So you can have multiple VMs but you can't use more than 750 hrs monthly at their sum. No cumulative bonus from one month to another. Continue to use the free services portal to create them, that's very important and you'll understand why below.

2- The SQL database: you have a free 250GB SQL db using a 10 DTU(S0) w/ 250 GB of VM (computing+storage resources). Now, pay attention, till this date, there is a bug in the template creation! When you click on create from the free services section of Azure portal for the 250GB SQL server, the template generated is using a General Purpose Gen5, 2Vcores,32GB storage machine, which is not eligible for the free offer. So if you do nothing and just complete ( as I said above and as MS recommends), you will be charged for the next days. So, after fill the DB server and naming, click in configure database, then looking for basic, standard, and premium, then the standard config of the free DB will be shown ( S0 10 DTU w/250GB) , click on apply, and only then click in review+create. This way you won't be charged.

3- I call it a bug but can also be a flaw, I complained and the support eng, understood my concerns. You can not advertise a free service, follow the steps to make it happened, and start to be charged for it. Probably they gonna fix it sometime in the future. Meanwhile, keep an eye on it. I will attach the screens so anyone could understand it better.

Answer 3

Answer 4

And the docs :

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cost-management-billing/manage/avoid-charges-free-account

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cost-management-billing/manage/create-free-services

Answer 5

@PdrTechs
Since your issue is related to the billing/costs I would recommend to contact Azure Billing team, who can provide experts insights and quick resolution on this issue. It's free and best for your scenario.

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/support/create-ticket/