(upbeat vocalizing music) - Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of "Bits & Pieces." This is a series for Visual Studio subscribers. And I wanna thank you for joining us today. I'm your host, April Edwards. And just like you, I'm a developer, and I work for GitHub. Now, as part of my job, I wanna know what tools I can use to help me develop applications more effectively. Now, to set expectations in today's episode, we're briefly gonna give you an overview of the monthly Azure credit and what it can be used for. Now, Visual Studio Subscriptions has an Azure monthly credits, which are included if you're a paid volume licensing subscriber, or you have a retail Visual Studio Enterprise subscription, or even a Professional or a Test Professional, and even the MSDN platform subscriptions. Now, some of the other programs or channels, like MPM, MCT, MPSA, and BizSpark, also have Azure credits. And kudos to you if you know exactly what those acronyms stood for, because I don't. So here's the basic breakdown of how much monthly Azure credit is included with each of those subscription types. So if you're a Visual Studio Enterprise subscriber, you're gonna have 150 US dollars per month. If you're a Visual Studio Professional or Test Professional subscriber, you're gonna have 50 US dollars per month. Now, if you're an MSDN's platform subscription subscriber, you're gonna have 100 US dollars per month. So these credits are part of your subscription, and automatically renew every single month. So you don't have to put down a credit card to get going. It's pretty easy. Now, in case you do exhaust your credit, which does happen, these services will shut off automatically, not incurring you any further charges. So if you don't know what subscription level you have, or which program you have access to, you can go to subscriptions page in your portal by visiting my.visualstudio.com/subscriptions. So to help me today, I'd like to introduce our very special guest, Javier Lozano. Hey, Javier. - Hey, April. How's it going? - I'm doing well, man. It's good to see you. - I know. Thank you very much for having me on the show. This is really exciting, and can't wait to talk to you about all the awesomeness of Visual Studio subscriptions. - Me either. And, you know, before we get started, I mean, you and I know each other, like, super well. We're pretty much biffles. Can you tell everyone else out there who you are and what is you do? - Yes, like April said, my name is Javier Lozano. I'm a Microsoft MVP, which stands for most valuable professional. I spend a lot of time of giving back to the community, so in particularly in the .NET space. So I'm a .NET developer, primarily in ASP.NET. I live in the middle of the US in Iowa. So I actually have an Azure data center close to my house, which is great. - That's awesome. But first and foremost, I wanna thank you for being an MVP, 'cause the hard work you put into the community is amazing. And I know there are tons of MVPs out there watching today. And thank each and every one of you, 'cause your contributions help make what we do at GitHub and Microsoft so much better. So, thank you. - Yep. - Alright, so, we wanna talk about Azure credits today. So I'm gonna let you get started. - Yep. So let's go take a look at the Azure Portal, and we can go from here. So for this specific situation, like this conversation, is I wanted, I created a simple, a different resources out in the Azure Portal that I kind of wanna talk through and highlight as we go along. So now, I have the Visual Studio Enterprise subscription. That means that I have $150 that I can reuse month to month. Now, I have barely am able to tap into those $150, because there's a lot of free resources out there within Azure that I can play with and get an understanding of how to use them, so. - So we can work smarter, not harder, and- - Right, exactly. - I like that. I like that. - Yep. Yep. I think my average Azure bill is about 55 US dollars a month. So I'm barely tapping into it, and I have things running out there full time. So it allows you, depending on what kind of development or kinda proof of concept things you want to do, it is great way to get to dip your toe into the Azure services. - Awesome. Now, I'm based in the UK, so they convert that 150 US dollars a month to British Pound, GBP. And so, for those of you in other countries, they'll convert that to your local currency. So you'll see whatever the local currency is in the Azure Portal, and you'll get that currency in your monthly allowance every month. - Right, and there's a way there, right now, I don't have it set up in the dashboard here, we just have the plain old view of the resources, but you can actually drop widgets in a dashboard, and it will tell you, "Hey, you have this, you've consumed this many credits." Or you can say, "Hey, you have this many credits left in your monthly." So it allows you to, if you're doing a lot of playing around with those credits, you sort of know where you're at and at the level when you go around. - Awesome. So you can keep track of it. You can also put spending limits, all that good stuff. So, I want to know, what kind of usage scenarios can we get into? Like, what are the most cost-effective ways to get started? And I know you're a .NET developer. I'm more kind of like cloud native, working with serverless and all that, but let's start with some kind of cloud scenarios that we can get started with in Azure. - So the scenario that works the best for both being a .NET developer or a web developer and cloud native developer is something called an App Service, okay? And the App Service, essentially it is a way to carve out a website out in Azure that, and Azure does all the managing for you, because it's platform as a service, which is great. So, let me bring that up here in the portal. So I'm gonna go through to the hamburger menu up here and say create resource. I'm gonna look for App Service. And when you look for App Service, there's several things that sort of come up here. There is a App Service environment, App Service plan, and web app, okay? The big thing to realize here is that even though we're talking about an App Service, like here, we're actually talking about an App Service plan. That's the thing that you pay for. And the plan is great, because you're literally are carving out a server of a certain size out there for you, and that's what the credits are being used for. - So paying for compute on someone else's machine. - Correct. And the nice thing about it is, like, you can put as many websites as you want as that compute instance that you carved out can handle. So if you have six websites that you wanna try out and have them each do different things, it's not like, oh, I have to pay for each individual one. No, you're paying for the plan, and the plan is spread out across all those instances. - Awesome. - So, great. So, if we go and kind of look at that, one of the things that we can do if I create an App Service is pretty straightforward. So the entire portals steps you through the wizard. So you can say, "I have my Visual Studio subscription here." That's the number of my subscription. I have the Bits and Pieces resource group. And then I can start picking and choosing the settings that I want. For example, I can call it "bitsandpiecesapp", and it will validate that it's there, and I can select, yep, I'm gonna make this a .NET 6 app or a .NET 7 app. You know, I can pick whichever I want to. And I'm, as I mentioned, I do have a data center close to me, and I'm gonna pick US Central. Actually, Central US. There it is. And from here, this is where you can start picking and choosing the size of that App Service plan. So you have the option of creating a brand new one, or creating an existing one, depending on what sort of where you wanna go. - Okay. And I can see you have, your pricing plan has the total amount of consumption, so, RAM and CPU. - Right, it has it, yep. So if you were, if we were to click here, this is where it, and by the way, I've been using Azure for a long time. This is by far the best way of looking at the data, because it just tells you specifically what you're getting, what is the virtual CPUs, right, what's the memory, what's the storage, and how many instances you can scale each individual website to, and you see the price on the right. - Awesome. - Which is awesome. Yep. So then you can say, "Hey, you know what, for my $150, I can go as," and believe it or not, Azure is phenomenal when it comes to cost for hosting. You can get a Premium v3, PV3, which essentially has 4 gigs of memory and 250 gigabyte storage. And you can go up higher, depending on what kind of workloads that you foresee having with your applications. But the sky's the limit. You can spend as much as you want on it, and obviously with your credit, you will be consuming, like you said, to that specific point, and then the App Service plan will stop. - Perfect. Awesome. So yeah, so we can build a website, host our webpages, and we could use a basic plan, we could use a simple plan, even a premium plan that's pretty cost effective. - Yep. Yep. From my perspective, the Visual Studio Subscription is a great way to kick the tires around with Azure, especially if you work in an enterprise that has Azure. You can figure out, hey, here's what, how I actually configure an App Service. Because you may, you as a developer, right, or front-end worker may not be doing that day-to-day. Someone in your IT back office could do it. And it's great, so that way, you can have that conversation with them and figure out, oh, we should do X, we should do Y. - Absolutely, and work together as a team. So, what if I have a database? 'Cause I'll be honest, a lot of my websites have databases attached to them. How do we handle that? - That's a great question. So, just like we did with that, we can go back to "Create a resource" and we can search for SQL Database. Now, SQL Database is essentially a hosted instance of SQL Server-like functionality. It's not SQL Server per se, because it's totally different, right? But it's essentially a platform as a service SQL Server. And one of the things that you can do, and similar to here, I'll go ahead create, and I'll create a SQL Database, is you can cherry pick the different type of resources that you can do. Now, this is a little bit different from this type of wizard, because there's an option here where it talks about want to try SQL Database for free. - Absolutely. - Yeah, so there are tool tips that you can easily go through and select the different types of cores that you want. So in this screen, we can create a database, just like we can with the other wizards in within Azure. One of the things to note here is the price is estimated at $272 per month, right? So that's more than our credit. But there's a service, there's an offer, what you can see here, where we can apply and get SQL Azure Database for free. - Awesome. - The way we are able to trigger something like this is that we have to go and change the workload environment from production to development because we're in a subscription. So we're not in a actual production Azure subscription. - Right, correct. - So, by switching the workload environment, now we can see that the price has significantly dropped. Right, so it's now much, much more affordable, even with our credit. So now we apply the offer. We can see that we now have the database running completely for free. - Awesome. That's a really cool trick, because databases are expensive. Storing data's expensive. So that's really, really cool. So Javier, that's awesome. I love that. I love, I mean, I've seen the discount before. I've never seen the free offer for the free database. - Right, in particular, since it's 32 gigabytes of data. I mean, I have production subscriptions out there that are paying for 200, you know, gigabytes and so forth, and the price goes up. So for 32 gigabytes, kick the tires with Azure SQL Database. It's amazing. - That's awesome. That's really cool. So, that was awesome to see Azure Web Apps with databases. That's a really huge use case, getting started with Azure, right, moving web applications over. We can containerize and we can do all sorts of stuff there. But I wanna talk about some of the other free services. What are some of the other free ones that we have? I have a few that I love, but what's your favorite one? - So, one of the ones that I like the most, which is ties there directly to App Services, is Azure Functions, right? I'm not sure if you like Azure, if you're a fan of Azure Functions or not. - I love Azure Functions. The reason why I love Azure Functions is you can literally automate anything with an Azure Function. So you can use a timer trigger, you can use an action or an event, but they also connect to legacy systems. So they're great in serverless cloud native systems, but then they're also great connecting to maybe like an on-prem data center or a legacy monolith, where you're trying to just do a thing or automate a thing. I will automate so many things with actions, excuse me, with Azure Function apps. And I believe on Azure Function apps, your first million calls to a function are free. So they're not entirely free, but if you're making, like, a million calls a month, that's insane. So let's look at some use cases for Azure Functions, 'cause I think there's some good enterprise use cases and some good fun use cases. - Yeah. So ideally with an Azure Function, it's kind of one of those settings where you can easily set it and forget it, right? So, where you can say, "Hey, behind the scenes, I've received this request," for example, uploading a file, right? So you have an API that you send the file, and you wanna be able to say, "Hey, I wanna be able to index this file, change the name, do something else with it." You will then can trigger a function after the upload is done or after the file has been saved to storage per se, and it will pick it up and it will do the work, at that point, it will be completely out of band from what you're doing. - So I actually used Azure Functions in a customer product, and it was very cost savings. So they had a very manual process happening in their organization, and they need to process data. When I say data, images and videos. And we use the function, anytime an incoming image or video came in, to process that, and we chain them together. Then there's things like durable functions and logic apps that you can hook it, obviously. You can chain all these serverless things together. But the compute cost to the customer was minimal every month in a production environment, 'cause we could chain them. But actually I have a favorite use case for Functions I think we should talk about. - Oh, you do. I think we talked about this before. - We did. And you know exactly where this is going. And this is something I haven't done in a while, but with an Azure Function, you can use sentiment analysis. And you're thinking, okay, why do I wanna know what other people are feeling and thinking? Now, first use case is if you own an organization, or are trying to get feedback off of people, especially social media, you can hook in sentiment analysis from a function that anytime someone does a thing, you get that feedback. So for instance, I have potentially been stranded at an airport, and a specific airline just left me there, and I sent an angry, formerly tweet, now X or whatever we call it, and they picked up on it and they responded. And I love this, so I love Twitter, well, we call, it's still called the Twitter Sentiment Analysis component, but it, X, Twitter, whatever. We have all these connectors that are pre-baked into Function. So Twitter's one of 'em. So it's great if you wanna use a hashtag and get the sentiment anytime that hashtag's used. And actually I use that on one of the engineering teams I worked on to get product feedback from that product. But it's also fun if, like, you send a tweet or an X or whatever we call it, and you wanna get that feedback from someone, like, whether people liked or disliked your post. So I really like it. I'm a big fan of the sentiment analysis. - When you think about it, it kind of shows you, you know, 'cause sentiment analysis just is yet another Azure service, right? It's part of, you know, even though it says here Azure Cognitive Services, is now Azure AI Services, because of recent rebranding, right? But it kind of shows you, like you were talking earlier, how you can stitch the different pieces together. And the nice thing about it, it's, A, not gonna break the bank, B, you already have the credit, and so you can pay for those to that analysis as the texts come in. And the best part about this one is that it's completely turnkey. So you can just get it for free, create the Functions, it steps you through everything, right, and it tells you specifically what you need to configure and where you can get the settings from. How do you trigger it? And it literally just runs for you. And the best part about it, if you go with a consumption level, which means essentially the function only runs when it's called, rather than something just sitting out there and being in the background, your cost and usage just literally drops. - Yes, and it's practically free, unless you hit those million calls. And that's crazy. Now, I know there's some other free things we want to talk about, but I actually wanna touch on the AI piece, 'cause AI's a hot topic right now. - It is. - What are some of the other AI features that we can use in Azure with our credit? - So that's a great question. So another, some of the other features that we can use, and I'll come back to the Marketplace, and I will say Create a resource, if we look for Azure, Azure AI, we can see all the different things that we have out here. So we can actually, this is, and the nice thing about is when you look at the Marketplace, you can see other stuff that comes up, right? It may not be applicable to your subscription, because it's an extra cost, 'cause you need to have that subscription with that vendor, for example, like, this Generative AI for Software Developers. That might be a third party thing that you can align to and pay for. But in particular here, anything that you can do with the Azure AI services, which is, again, hosted and ran by Azure, you can pretty much do whatever you want. And you can pick the different types of services that you want. You can pick the different pricing tiers. You can look at what's out there. But for example, one of the cool ones that you can do is that you can do computer vision. - Ah, that's pretty cool. - So, and I've actually used computer vision several times, where with working with clients, where you can upload an image and you can tell computer vision, these are the type of images that I am uploading. For example, that could be a form that you wanna be able to parse to be able to know, oh, this is a form X compared to form Y. So as the images get uploaded, and they get thrown into Azure storage, the computer vision can look 'em up and actually start sorting 'em and provide metadata for you, completely out of the box. - Yes, and I've used this before where we've, again, processed images with tags, right? We use tags to process the metadata. And it was all done under .NET Functions actually. This is really cool. So I love that. And I think everyone's looking how to use AI to how do we collate our data, how do we index it, how do we use it? How do we do more with it? So this is really good. This is a really good usage scenario. - And another thing, like, for example, here you can also do the Video Indexer, so, if you're uploading video, so it's not just static content such as an image, right? But if you wanna able to do an upload a video, and able to understand what's going on in that video, and split it and get that metadata out of it, the AI is there to do it. And the nice thing about it is that you can scale it, right? So as you saw on the other screen, you can pick what's standard, and you can say, "Hey, I need more horsepower." So, and then you can change that after you've created the service. - Awesome. Now, I've used a lot of the stuff with the serverless stuff. We talked about Functions. I wanna switch gears again, and talk about another one of my favorite services. So, you talked about Azure Web Apps. One of my favorite Azure features is Azure Static Web Apps. - Yes. - So, because they're entirely free. I mean, there's a paid-for tier, but it's a free tier. You can hook in your Functions to it. You can hook an AI to it actually. And it gives you a pretty good foundation to build a Static Web App. - Yep, it does. Yeah. The nice thing about Static Web Apps is that that point is the sky is the limit, right? So, say for example, you, your company or you're playing around with front-end development, right, whether it be Blazor from the .NET perspective, Angular or React or whatever those, whatever the content is, you can actually tell and deploy that application as it sits, right, into the Static Web Apps, get 100 gigabits of bandwidth. That is a lot of bandwidth. - That is a lot of bandwidth. - Per subscription, right, total. Especially if you're just playing around with it, right, if you have an Angular app or a Blazor app that you wanna throw out there. You also get free domains attached to it, which is great, because that way you can say, "Hey, I have my example .com, right, or example .net URL's gonna tie directly to it." And those Static Web Apps can call resources, such as an Azure Function behind the scenes, to do whatever processing you want. So, all in all, you can deploy a very powerful application on the free services very quickly. - You just chain them all together, effectively. - Yes, exactly. - Create your whole workflow, which I think is awesome. Now, when you deployed your Azure Web App before, you did it from the Portal, which is fair, you know, everyone likes to point and click a little bit, but I wanna talk about automation, 'cause I'm a big fan of automating everything. So when you deploy an Azure Static Web App, or even Azure Web App, you have the ability to automate this after you deploy it with either GitHub and GitHub actions, which we'll discuss another day, but also things like Azure DevOps, and Azure DevOps is free if you use up to five users. So you can automate all these deployments with Azure DevOps hooked into the Azure Portal. - Right, and I already have. I do use leverage quite a bit, the free offering from Azure DevOps, because it allows you essentially have unlimited projects, right, unlimited private GitHub repo, I'm sorry, Git repos, right, as compared with GitHub, or, like, by default they're public, right? So there's a little bit different there. And it allows you to use Azure Pipelines. So you can either use the YAML pipelines that you have out of the box, or you can use what it's called the classic pipelines, which is like WYSIWYG, right? So you're able to select, click, and do those. The same thing with releases. You can do YAML based releases, or you can do classic releases, which is, again, it's more of a GUI based. So in here, I'm just sort of showing, here's some of the pipelines that I've built in the past, and these are mostly GUI-based ones, and they're kinda old, but they work, right? And the nice thing about it is that for what I'm doing for deploying that simple app into my Azure resources that, sorry, for my free Azure resources, this costs me nothing. So not only do I have CICD for free, I also have the Azure hosting for free, which is great. - That's awesome. I love that. I think that that's a whole, I mean, with Azure DevOps, you also have planning. You have a repo. You can put your code in there. You don't have to pay for that. You can do also things with, like, test plans and your project as a whole. So, that's awesome. So we could literally build out our, put our, we have somewhere to put our code. We have somewhere to deploy it to with pretty much free, if not mostly free with our credit. That's awesome. I think that's a really good start for people out there. All right? So we can, let's see, we have App Service plans with databases. We have Azure Functions. We have Azure Static Web Apps, Azure DevOps, and a lot of the AI services. Is there anything else that we're missing that we should tell people about? - That's a good question. You know, there's a lot of different things that you can go into that obviously cognitive search that you can get into in the AI pieces. You can also get into storage. And actually the thing that people miss about is storage, and storage is so cheap in Azure that you don't even think about it, 'cause you just assume that's always there. It's kinda like RAM and CPU, right? But all of these different services, as you go and develop and you start playing around and kicking the tires, you will realize that, oh, I didn't know I could do X or I could do Y. And obviously your mileage will vary, depending on the type of workloads and the type of problems you're solving in your organization. - And there's a list, we will put it in the description, that has a list of just all the Azure services that you have access to that are either free or discounted. And actually, the list shows all the free services. So there's a lot of good stuff. So we talked about CICD, but you can throw in monitoring tools. Azure Policy actually is free as well. So you can do some checks and balances. You could actually practice what you would do in a production environment for pretty much nothing. So, Javier, this is awesome. This was great to see. I love being able to see the ways we can kind of like really leverage our spending budget, because I don't wanna go over that 150 US dollars a month, because I've done that. I've accidentally gone over. - Trust me, I've had services that, you know, out there that I'm like, oh, I'm doing a demo. I'm presenting in front of, you know, doing my MVP duties and doing something like that. And the thing dies because, oh, I forgot that I forgot to shut off the other demo that I did the week before, and it consumed all the resources. So, that will happen. But if it does, I mean, it just shuts off, right? So it's not like you're on the hook to pay the difference in the money that's there. - Awesome. Well, Javier, thank you so much, and thank you everyone for tuning in today, and we'll see you all next time on "Bits & Pieces." - Thanks, everybody. (upbeat vocalizing music)
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