Set a budget alert first, then see the public cloud's self-service for yourself

Steps

1. Set the budget before you do anything else. In the Azure portal, search for Cost Management and open it, then choose Budgets. Check that the scope shown at the top of the page is your subscription, not a resource group; if it is not, choose Scope and select the subscription. Choose Add. On Create budget, name it az900-monthly-budget, keep Reset period as Monthly and the start date as this month, and set Amount to a small figure in your billing currency: the least you would want to hear about. Choose Next. Under Alert conditions, add two alerts: type Actual at 50 percent of the budget, and type Forecasted at 100 percent. Under Alert recipients (email), enter you@example.com, putting your own email address in its place. Choose Create. The budget now watches the whole subscription, so it sees spending in every resource group you make later.
2. Open Azure Cloud Shell from the Cloud Shell button in the portal's top bar and choose Bash. The first time it starts, choose No storage account required, pick your subscription and choose Apply. Then check which cloud and which subscription the CLI is using:

az cloud show --query name -o tsv
az account show --query name -o tsv

The first command prints AzureCloud: the global public cloud, which Microsoft builds, owns and maintains, and sells to any organisation or person. The second prints your subscription's name. If you have more than one subscription and it is the wrong one, switch with az account set --subscription "My subscription name" before going on. 3. See self-service on demand. Create a resource group, a free container for resources, with a tag that records which cloud model it lives in:

az group create --name az900-lab01-rg --location eastus --tags model=public

This lab uses the region eastus. You may pick one nearer to you, but use it in every command. The command comes back within seconds with "provisioningState": "Succeeded". Nobody raised a purchase order, nothing was shipped and there is nothing to depreciate. That is the difference between renting cloud services and buying servers, or renting rack space for servers you own, which is colocation. 4. See measured use. In the portal, go back to Cost Management and choose Cost analysis, with your subscription as the scope. The chart shows what this subscription has been metered for so far this month. On a new subscription it is probably empty, and the resource group adds nothing, because a resource group costs nothing. Every resource that does cost money appears here as it is used, usually some hours later. That delay is why the budget alert from step 1 matters: it watches the meter even when you are not looking. 5. Decide who owns each duty under the shared responsibility model, for three workloads: a Windows Server virtual machine in Azure (IaaS), a web app on Azure App Service (PaaS), and email in Microsoft 365 (SaaS). For each workload, write Microsoft or Customer against each duty: (a) replacing a failed disk in a host server; (b) installing security updates on the operating system; (c) deciding which staff can sign in; (d) the data that is stored; (e) guarding the datacenter building; (f) writing and maintaining the application code. Check your answers in the Notes. 6. Match each scenario to the cloud model it describes: public, private, hybrid, multi-cloud, or not cloud computing at all. (1) A start-up with no datacenter and little capital wants to launch next month. (2) A defence contractor's system must run on hardware no other organisation shares. (3) A hospital keeps patient records in its own datacenter and runs its appointment website in Azure, with the two connected. (4) A retailer whose own servers cannot handle the holiday peak sends the extra traffic to Azure and pulls back in January. (5) A company with no datacenter runs some workloads in Azure and others with a second public provider. (6) A business leases rack space in someone else's building for servers it bought itself. Check your answers in the Notes.