Azure setup

Setting up an Azure account is straightforward. Just like AWS, there are many services and incentives that Azure offers to attract users in the highly competitive public cloud market. Please check out the https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/free/ page for the latest offerings. At the time of writing, Azure is offering big promotions on Artificial Intelligence and Kubernetes services with many amazing products being always free or free for the first twelve months:

Figure 2: Azure portal (source: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/free/)

After the account is created, we can see the services available on the Azure portal at https://portal.azure.com:

Figure 3: Azure services

Before any service can actually be launched, however, we will need to provide a payment method. This is done by adding a subscription service:

Figure 4: Azure subscriptions

I would recommend adding a Pay-As-You-Go plan, which has no up-front costs and no long-term commitment...