Azure free services
When trying to decide which public cloud to use, often a key decision point is cost.
There are ~25 services that are free in Azure. But, some of these are services that compliment others or the platform use itself rather than a standalone feature.
| Service Name | Details |
|---|---|
| 5 GB of bandwidth for outbound data transfer with free unlimited inbound transfer | Fairly self-explanatory. But if your usage lines up, you could have free inbound and outbound data to Azure forever. |
| 10 web, mobile, or API apps with Azure App Service with 1 GB storage | This is a good one, the free tier can be quite slow, but free web apps! |
| 1 million requests and 400,000 GBs of resource consumption with Azure Functions | Most likely need additional resources etc to make full use of this, but a great free quota |
| 100,000 operations for event publishing and delivery with Event Grid | Same as above! |
| Free Azure Container service to cluster virtual machines | Container service is basically deprecated now. |
| 50,000 stored objects with Azure Active Directory with single sign-on (SSO) for 10 apps per user | Identity is important, so very handy to have that many objects but free, but check feature set in AAD Free works for you. |
| 50,000 monthly stored users and 50,000 authentications per month with Azure Active Directory B2C | Depending on your B2C requirements, 50k could be more than enough or just part of your daily active. Either way, free quota is good. |
| Free Azure Service Fabric to build microservice apps | Helpful, but you have to pay for everything you build. |
| Unlimited nodes (server or platform-as-a-service instance) with Application Insights and 1 GB of telemetry data included per month | As it says, can be difficult to estimate your telemetry data though, so one to keep an eye on. |
| First 5 users free with Azure DevOps | Straight forward and good. |
| Unlimited use of Azure DevTest Labs | Very ambiguous. You can configure it and create templates, but you pay for everything you deploy as normal. |
| Machine Learning with 100 modules and 1 hour per experiment with 10 GB included storage | A great starter quota |
| Free policy assessment and recommendations with Azure Security Center | Another great free addition to an overall service |
| Unlimited recommendations and best practices with Azure Advisor | Helpful, not sure if anyone would pay for it if it wasn't free though. |
| Free Azure IoT Hub edition includes 8,000 messages per day with 0.5 KB message meter size | Excellent starter quota |
| 5 free low frequency activities with Azure Data Factory | Still have to pay for that DF. |
| 50 MB storage for 10,000 hosted documents with Azure Search including 3 indexes per service | Excellent starter quota |
| Free namespace and 1 million push notifications with Azure Notification Hubs | Good service, most likely need additional paid services to get full benefit |
| Unlimited Azure Batch usage for job scheduling and cluster management | Similar to devtest labs offer, pay for what is deployed |
| Free 500 minutes of job run time with Azure Automation | Excellent starter quota |
| Unlimited users and 5,000 catalog objects with Azure Data Catalog | Excellent starter quota |
| 30,000 transactions per month processing at 20 transactions per minute with Face API | Excellent starter quota |
| Free 2 million characters included for Translator Text API | Excellent starter quota |
| Free 5 GB per month analysis plus 31-day retention period with Log Analytics | Excellent starter quota, again watch the ingestion of data |
| 50 virtual networks free with Azure Virtual Network | Not sure what use they are without other paid services, but still free |
| Unlimited inbound Inter-VNet data transfer | Great that it's free, but you pay for outbound so be careful |
At the moment, there is also plenty of great offers for first time sign-up that gives you free resource usage for 12 months and some monthly credit. More on those here. Some nice resources are part of that offer, including B-series VM and CosmosDB.
Of course, with anything free, please be careful and double check your usage so you’re not surprised with a significant bill.
