For the past few months, I’ve tried to move all of my hobby development activities to a VM on Microsoft Azure. The results have been pretty promising. MSDN members receive free Azure credits each month. This benefit is more than enough to cover the costs for my development needs.

The costs

When I first started to try this, I was very confused by the cost structure. Most of the information available seems to be aimed at use of Azure for servers, so everything is focused on hourly costs for machines running twenty-four hours per day. Thankfully, there is information applicable to more piecemeal usage, like hobby development.

Virtual machine cost

Azure offers three ways to pay for a VM - Pay As You Go, 1 Year Reserved, and 3 Years Reserved. Since I’m not planning to use this VM all of the time, the Pay As You Go option works best for hobby development. I found the VM pricing to make sense.

For my use case, I wanted VMs that with SSD drives for the OS disk. This was a bit difficult to find initially, but eventually I settled on the Fv2 Series running Ubuntu Linux. Currently, these VMs are only available in the West US 2 region. If you don’t care about the region of the VM, check each of the available regions - there may be different VM options in each region.

Disk cost

I was rather confused by disk cost for a while. The VMs have an OS disk, but is the data on the disk persistent? Or do I need to also pay for storage? I don’t need a database service like a website might, I just want a normal disk which can store data over time.

It turns out that each VM can be configured with a different OS disk - with a certain size and performance characteristics. This disk is persistent, so I can set up the OS and store in-progress work on it as I would on a local computer. In Azure, these are called “managed disks”, their pricing is again organized by region and type.

I wanted the performance of an SSD, so I’m using a Premium Managed Disk in the West US 2 region. Hard disk drives are called Standard Managed Disks. Again, options may vary by region.

How it all works

Putting this all together, I’m using the following:

1. Free MSDN account, with $50/month Azure credit
2. 256 GB Premium Managed Disk (SSD) - $34.56/month
3. Ubuntu VM, F8v2 - $0.358/hour

This configuration lets me use an 8 core machine with 16 GB of RAM. After the OS disk cost, I have $15.44 to spend each month on the VM. That leaves me with about 43 hours per month of time the F8v2 VM can be running. Azure let’s me easily re-size the VM, so I can switch to a smaller, less expensive one if I start to run out of credit.

My schedule allows me to spend 3-4 hours on hobby development per week at most, so even with some wiggle room to let the VM run for a few hours to complete builds, I’m well under the total monthly credit.

Shutting down the VM

The key to make all of this work out is shutting down the VM so it is not incurring costs when not in use. Since I’m the only user on this VM, I don’t need to leave it running like I would a server. Note that the VM must be shutdown via the Azure portal to make this work. Shutting it down from the Linux command line is not enough, since Azure will keep its resources in use.

Each time the VM is started, it will get new resources, including a new IP address. However, the VM can be assigned a host name, so the difference in IP address is not important for my use case.

Going over the limits

More than once in the last few months I’ve accidentally used too many resources, and went over my monthly budget for the free plan. Thankfully, Azure does not require a form of payment beyond the free plan. Once the credit is exhausted, VMs cannot be started until the credit resets next month. All of the configuration and data on the VM is persisted, so it is easy to start again the next month.

A great deal

Since I’m only using this VM a few hours per week, Azure is the perfect solution for my hobby development needs. A comparable physical machine would have significant up-front cost, and would still not get any more usage than the Azure VM. I’ve tried to do hobby development like this with other cloud providers, but the free plan for Azure offers the most value, by far.