A lot of us are using cloud technologies in our workplace - perhaps Azure, perhaps Amazon, or even one of the other more specialist providers like Heroku. While we may have access to some particular resources via the workplace, it is always good to have your own personal cloud account to test things out for yourself, and build up experience you may not get in the office environment.
The Microsoft 'MS Developer Essentials' offering is an excellent value for money programme that gives developers $25 credit on Azure, every month, for free! ... as with the
PluralSight offer recently discussed, you do need to give a credit card up front to open the account, but once thats done, you can put a spend limit on your account so you are never in danger of spending money you dont want to (just because you forgot to turn off an experimental virtual machine or service!). But is it worth it, and
what exactly can you do with $25 credit?
![]()
So what can you do on Azure with $25 ?
You have heard of course of the great value to be had using a cloud host. This is of course makes sense when you want huge scalability, inbuilt security, great backend facilities etc., but that all adds up, What if you just want to experiment, play around and test these technologies out for yourself? is the $25 credit really worth your time opening the account? Microsoft's developer evangelist's have had an 'Azure $25 challenge' going on, and it's surprising just how much they have been able to squeeze out of 25 bucks ... here are some highlights:
- Five linux virtual machines for a full day of testing
- Run an instance of HD-Insight (Hadoop cluster) for almost a week
- Spin up 50 websites for the fun!
I've opened my own account, and have been having a lot of fun working on a secret project that I will reveal in a few months when it's ready to roll out. MS Dev Essentials is a very exciting offer, and I am very buzzed with the opportunity offered to us all by the incredible technologies waiting for us to harness in Azure.
So heres my personal C# Corner Challenge to you...
Go and sign up for MS Dev Essentials today, and get your $25 credit. Then, use your $25 credit (and only that!) to build something cool, and come and write an article about it on our community website. The author of the best article, voted by the community leadership, will be presented with a copy of one of the top tech books from my personal bookshelf at the
C# Corner Cloud and IoT Conference in Delhi ...
so...
sign up, get coding, and get writing :)