I have a project going at work that might (or might not) eventually have something to do with Azure. So I’m using this as an excuse to finally learn a bit about it. I looked at a few ebooks and videos that weren’t that helpful, then I stumbled upon a free ebook from Microsoft titled Fundamentals of Azure. It was last revised in 2016, so it’s a little out of date, but still mostly relevant. It does a good job of walking you through all (well, most) of the services offered on Azure, without getting too deep. (But it does get deep enough to actually be useful to a working admin or programmer.) I wrote a short review of it on Goodreads.

I’m using the $50 monthly Azure credit that comes with my Visual Studio subscription, which is more than enough to play around with (assuming that you remember to delete everything you do after you’re done). I’m glad that my company (finally) decided to pay for VS subscriptions for us. There are a few nice benefits that come with that.

If I really needed to get serious about Azure, I’d look at the Microsoft Professional Program in Cloud Admin at EdX or something like that. (Of course, I’m more of a developer than an admin, myself, so that wouldn’t be right for me either way.)

I’d love to be able to do a big project that uses a mix of Azure services, but that’s probably not in the cards. Still, it’s good to be familiar with all this fancy cloud stuff!