Azure launches free $100 credit for students (GPU enabled)
Traditionally, Microsoft Azure has always given out free credit through their trial subscription (which is also available through their Visual Studio portal). However, these always came with limitations such as a core limit of 4 vCPUs.
For users looking to do more intense workloads that include a GPU or IaaS services, this previously would have been impossible without adding a credit card and converting your subscription type to Pay-As-You-Go.
As of today, March 1st 2018, Microsoft has launched a new service titled Azure for Students.
Furthermore, this is not limited to new customers. Existing users of Azure can simply verify their student status with a valid .edu email address, whereas new customers will need to provide a phone number for additional verification. This $100 of credit can be used to deploy VMs, set up IoT relays, allow 100 hours of GPU compute time, and host over 250GB of data on their database.
For users looking to set up a GPU instance, they simply have to change their VM disk type to HDD and set the VM location in a location which has NC or NV VMs enabled, such as East US, South Central US, US West 2, or North Europe. Furthermore, since it’s priced as “Pay-As-You-Go”, users can simply delete the resource group after they’ve finished their computation.
Furthermore, for easy deployment that comes with deep learning frameworks such as Tensorflow, Keras, etc, Azure has bundled all of these into a free pre-configured environment: Deep Learning Virtual Machine.
As a Microsoft Student Partner at UC Berkeley, I’m absolutely thrilled for this opportunity to have finally arrived, as it has been a difficult journey for many students to obtain free GPU compute.
If you want to take this for a test run, sign up today: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/free/students/
If anyone has questions or feedback on this service, please leave a comment below! I can’t wait to hear about how you guys plan to use this (:
