Microsoft Azure: account upgrade to keep going with free products

Today i got an e-mail about my azure account:

 Microsoft provides a little FAQ for this upgrading process:

So there is no option not to upgrade. "you won't be able to access any Azure services" is not really an option...

There 4 upgrade paths i can choose:

To use this account only for my blog, i decided to choose "no technical support", which is perfectly adequate.

After hitting the upgrade button, the notifications bar came up with the following message:

And the subscriptions tab inside the Azure portal shows:

Microsoft Azure: Creating a Linux machine and a first login via ssh

After having logged in to azure.microsoft.com i navigated to "Virtual machines":
There i hit the "create virtual machine" button and a wizard was opened, where the following steps have to be completed:

So here are the basic settings:

Inside the basic settings you have to choose the name and a resource group (in my case i had to create a resource group, because its my first vm).


Then i had to select an image:

Below this drop down is a link "browse all images and disks". If you choose that, you get many more options:

At "Administrator account" i chose "SSH public key" i added one (this field has a built-in check function, so if there is an copy/paste error, you get an immediate response):

Then i added the following for the disks:

And i left "networking" to the defaults up to the "select inbound ports":

For "Management" i had to create a storage account. This account has to unique  (mystorage  was already taken by some other azure users).

I left "Guest config" unchanged:

"Tags":

And then i had to wait some seconds at "Review + create" until the "validation passed" messaged appeared.

After that i had to wait for three minutes until my vm was ready to use:

 

And then i got the following dashboard for my vm:

 

A login to this machine was successful:

 ssh 40.112.94.136
The authenticity of host '40.112.94.136 (40.112.94.136)' can't be established.
ECDSA key fingerprint is SHA256:PxIwA6+b0lfcrV//yXpFUPjY3jiD2GgxME57EYQlx9Y.
Are you sure you want to continue connecting (yes/no)? yes
Warning: Permanently added '40.112.94.136' (ECDSA) to the list of known hosts.
Welcome to Ubuntu 18.04.1 LTS (GNU/Linux 4.15.0-1036-azure x86_64)

 * Documentation:  https://help.ubuntu.com
 * Management:     https://landscape.canonical.com
 * Support:        https://ubuntu.com/advantage

  System information as of Sat Jan 26 19:06:21 UTC 2019

  System load:  0.0               Processes:           113
  Usage of /:   4.1% of 28.90GB   Users logged in:     0
  Memory usage: 3%                IP address for eth0: 10.0.0.4
  Swap usage:   0%

  Get cloud support with Ubuntu Advantage Cloud Guest:
    http://www.ubuntu.com/business/services/cloud

0 packages can be updated.
0 updates are security updates.



The programs included with the Ubuntu system are free software;
the exact distribution terms for each program are described in the
individual files in /usr/share/doc/*/copyright.

Ubuntu comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by
applicable law.

To run a command as administrator (user "root"), use "sudo ".
See "man sudo_root" for details.

Microsoft Azure: Pricing Calculator

If you are thinking about to move your server/services/apps into Micosoft Azure, the pricing calculator would be very helpful to estimate the cost:
https://azure.microsoft.com/de-de/pricing/calculator/

The usage is very simple. Just use the kind of service you want to use from Microsoft Azure:

 And modify the defaults to you needs:

The problem is, that it is not so easy to calculate the number of i/o transactions for your application, but for a first start these number should be sufficient.