To start developing with Windows Azure, you can subscribe to a free one month trial along with free credit worth $200. To go along with this, many of its services have free tiers that give you lower performance versions. So if your trial expires, you can continue your development at little or no cost, depending on the services you are using.
Begin by navigating to http://windowsazure.com/pricing/free-trial and carry out the following steps:
- Click on the Try it now link.
- Sign in with a Windows Live ID.
- For security purposes, verify your account via your phone or a text message.
- Enter the payment information. This is only used if you exceed your spending limits. You won't accidentally spend beyond budget by developing your app—you will only spend money once a couple hundred users are interacting with your services.
- Check I agree to the policies and click on Sign Up.
- Review the final setting and click on Submit.
If all the required information is entered correctly, you will now have access to the Azure subscription page. Your subscription page will look like the following screenshot:
You can click the Portal link in the top-right corner of the page to access your account. In the future, you can manage your Azure services at http://manage.windowsazure.com.
Complete the Windows Azure Tour to get a quick rundown of the management portal's features. You can then access the main menu to create new Azure services, virtual machines, and so on. The main menu looks like the following screenshot:
This concludes your sign up for Windows Azure. It is pretty simple compared to the Apple and Google Play developer programs. Feel free to play around and keep in mind that it is difficult to spend money accidentally unless you are delivering content to real users. Azure has free versions of most services and also delivers a good amount of bandwidth for free. You can get more information on pricing at http://windowsazure.com/en-us/pricing/overview.
Note that there are a lot of misconceptions about Windows Azure being expensive. You can do all of your development for an application on the free tier without spending a dime. When putting applications into production, you can easily scale up or down on the number of VM instances to keep your costs under control. In general, you will not be spending a lot of money if you do not have a lot of users, and luckily you should be making plenty of money if you have lots of users.