Free Azure for your courses! No credit cards required!

Windows Azure education grants allow you to use Windows Azure in your courses and the students do not need to enter any credit card information.

Microsoft provides grants for educators who want to use Windows Azure in their courses. When you receive a grant you receive Academic passes for you and your students. The educator gets a 12 month pass and 5 month passes for the students (valid from the date they are redeemed.)

You can apply here. You can find an FAQ here

What do you get?

• Compute • 1 hosted service, with 2 small compute instances
• Storage • 1 storage account, with 3GB of storage and 250,000 storage transactions
• Database • Two 1GB SQL Azure Web Edition databases
• Data Transfers (per region) • 3 GB in • 3 GB out
• Other • 100,000 Access Control transactions • 2 Service Bus connections

Any catch?

You do need to sign a gifting letter to ensure compliance with all applicable government gift and ethics rules.

What courses could use Windows Azure?

• Programming/Mobile/Gaming you can use Azure Mobile services to build shared back end for iOS, Android, Windows Phone 8 apps: Store data; Authenticate users; Push notifications
• IT administration courses to learn about virtualization and managing virtual machines
• Web development courses – build and deploy your websites on Azure Websites
• Database Courses – store your data in the cloud (even using Oracle)
• Multimedia courses – encode and share video
• And more… Azure offers a plethora of services and offerings, even Team Foundation has a cloud service so your students can manage their class projects in the cloud (they can do this for free with up to 5 team members without any Azure passes)

Recent Azure Announcements

• Azure has built in support for auto-scaling of websites, cloud services and Virtual Machines
• Oracle now has full support for Hyper-V and Azure Virtual machines, Oracle will provide Azure images of Oracle Linux
• Git Source control for scripts in Azure Mobile Services and shared scripts
• Push Notification support for Android added (iOS and Windows client libraries were already available)
• Free 20GB Database with Azure Mobile Services

Help your students explore the potential of cloud computing, apply for an Azure education grant today

I don’t teach courses, can I still get free Azure?

You can’t get an education grant, but anyone can try Azure for free

• Free 1 month trial of Azure is available to anyone
• If you are an MSDN subscriber you get free Azure benefits
• If you are a startup company, consider applying for BizSpark, so you can get MSDN which includes free Azure benefits and costs you nothing!

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