Creating my own Azure dev environment?

Posted by byrontheconqueror@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 11 comments

We're not part of a larger organization and recently migrated into their Azure tenant. My access to most stuff in there has been cut off and I have to open up requests for things now. My 1337 skills are starting to atrophy because I'm not in this stuff on a day to day basis. I'd really like to setup my own environment and mimic what we have in prod so I can kick the tires on stuff and be somewhat fluent in technical conversations. I want to play with conditional access policies, intune, autopilot, autopatch, etc, etc. What's the best way to go about this? Just buying my own E5 license or two? Do they offer any licensing for this purpose?

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11 Comments

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YSFKJDGS@reddit

Frankly, if you wanna stay on point and you actually find it interesting, you can probably justify to yourself the $50-100 a month cost in running a tenant with a couple real licensed users.

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byrontheconqueror@reddit (OP)

Yeah, that thought crossed my mind. I see that they have a developer sandbox option, but we dont qualify for it. It's $50-$100 per month and that would only be for a few licenses, that's the downside.

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YSFKJDGS@reddit

Yeah you have to decide on how much you need. If you are just messing with specific things, 1 or 2 users could be all you need for an o365 license standpoint. If you need servers, then it gets a little complicated and youll have to be bringing things up and down all the time. The easiest method is to build an on-prem AD at home, then sync it via ad connect. That way you can have a ton of users and just assign a license for specific things you are messing with.

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byrontheconqueror@reddit (OP)

Hmm, looks like if you have a visual studio subscription ($100 per month) you can join the developer program and qualify for the developer subscription which gives you access to a sandbox environment with 25 users and some populated data [https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/developer-program/microsoft-365-developer-program-faq#how-can-i-get-a-microsoft-365-e5-developer-subscription-via-the-developer-program---](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/developer-program/microsoft-365-developer-program-faq#how-can-i-get-a-microsoft-365-e5-developer-subscription-via-the-developer-program---)

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ChabotJ@reddit

[Set up your training environment - Training | Microsoft Learn](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/training/modules/sustainability-setup-environment/)

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byrontheconqueror@reddit (OP)

The trails are alright, but they expire after awhile. I'd like to keep the thing around so I can jump into it every time I get a new idea and want to try something.

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chesser45@reddit

A good opportunity to learn Terraform at the same time and build out your “state” so you can nuke and redeploy. *wink* Other than the trials if you have an enterprise agreement you can get a Dev sub which is a bit less expensive but you have to sign that you aren’t using it for prod workloads.

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Phate1989@reddit

He says azure, but all his requests are 365

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chesser45@reddit

I missed that. Can do some of that in declarified language though

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byrontheconqueror@reddit (OP)

exactly my point.

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patient-engineer-656@reddit

Are you a Microsoft Partner by any chance? You might be eligible for the Core benefits package which comes with a bunch of licenses and $2400 of annual credit in Azure. The Core benefits is $895 for the year.