For students looking to try out cloud computing, but who don't have access to a credit card, there's a new way to get access to Azure. Microsoft now offers a free Azure account to students in 140 countries, with free access to dozens of services — plus $100 in Azure credits for everything else. This gives students direct access to a powerful platform for statistical computing and AI application development in the cloud, including:
- 128 Gb of Managed Disk storage, for persisting data files
- 5Gb of Azure Cosmos DB, for data queries
- 1500 hours of Azure B1S virtual machines (split 50:50 between Windows and Linux VMs), which you can use to run the Data Science Virtual Machine
- 100-module experiments in Machine Learning Studio
- Free use of the Face API, Speech API and Translator Text API, up to specified query and rate limits
This is similar to the Free Azure account available to everyone, except that the free Azure credits can be used over 12 months (instead of 30 days) and, again, no credit card is required.
This is just a summary, and you can find the complete details here: Free Azure for Students.