Is there a way to try out Windows Azure?

Question

I've looked at the Introductory Special Offer, but you still need to provide a credit card because when you go over your limits, you do have to pay. Man, I'm just a developer and I would like to try some things out with Azure Cloud. How can you evaluate a product if you can't try it out... Is there a way to get a sort of developer trial?

Answer 1

I totally agree with your point. However if you want to just play around with the SDK for development, you could always use the Development Fabric locally.

Answer 2

Q: How can you evaluate a product if you can't try it out

Welcome to the "cloud"

Use an open-source Platform-as-a-service setup. This way, you can test things on your own machines and migrate to a host if you like it. I dare say, using a freely available language (Python, Java) and running in something (GAE) that resembles a normal API is better. Hadoop might even be an alternative, and use something like Cloudera.

Answer 3

MSDN Premium account holders get a special deal that provides quite a bit for free, and unless you try to launch a commercial site with it, I think you're going to have plenty of headroom:

• 3 1GB SQL Azure databases
• 7 GB in, 14 GB out monthly
• 750 hours (on a "small" compute instance)
• 1M access control transactions
• 5 service bus connections
• 10GB Azure storage + 1M storage transactions

I'd say that's pretty generous.

Answer 4

If you have an MSDN subscription, it comes with 750 hours of Azure.

Answer 5

At least in Germany, you can try Windows Azure for 90 days. If you use Germany as your country, you can still use it. (This account page is in German.)