Microsoft gives out free access to its Azure Machine Learning service

Maybe you’ve been holding off on using Microsoft recently announced Azure Machine Learning service for building models to incorporate into applications. Maybe you don’t want to pay money for that sort of service.

If that’s the case, you’ll welcome a recent development coming out of the PASS Summit in Seattle. Microsoft executives on the scene there announced that the company is opening up Azure Machine Learning to free access. That means you don’t need to plug in your credit card information if you want to try it.

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“This free tier is one more way Azure Machine Learning is making advanced analytics more accessible to more people,” T.K. Ranga Rengarajan, corporate vice president for the data platform inside Microsoft’s cloud and enterprise group, wrote today in a blog post announcing the news. “DBAs, developers, business intelligence professionals, and nascent data scientists can now experiment with Azure Machine Learning at no cost.”

Of course, other tools for doing machine learning exist on the Internet. Take Wise.io and BigML, for example. But as people try out Azure Machine Learning, they could be enticed to start using the raw cloud computing and storage infrastructure inside the Microsoft Azure public cloud. Perhaps that, if anything, is the big story here, as cloud competitors Amazon and Google keep making announcements of their own that could bring in more business.