16.1 Introduction

Microsoft has some extremely powerful machine learning tools available in their Azure cloud platform that integrate with all other Azure services. In addition, they make many of these services free (for a limited time or quantity) for students to learn. Let's get started by signing up for an Azure for Students Starter account. You will have to use an email address with a .edu top-level domain. Follow along with the videos below to create your Azure for Students account and setup a machine learning workspace.

Finally, to keep these videos as short as possible, I do not spend much time explaining the technical architecture of the new Azure ML environment. It may be very useful to bookmark the documentation for Azure ML: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/machine-learning/. For example, you might refer to it to better understand the differences among experiments, pipelines, and runs: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/machine-learning/concept-azure-machine-learning-architecture