aws vs azure which is easier to learn now comes down to two dates

Two dates changed the answer to aws vs azure which is easier to learn, and neither of them was about learning. On 16 July 2025, AWS announced that new accounts would get credits and a six-month clock instead of the 12-month free tier people had been recommending for years. The second date is fuzzier, because Microsoft never announced anything. Somewhere between late 2025 and early 2026, the Microsoft Learn sandbox stopped existing.

I opened both vendors’ own docs on 20 August 2026 and then counted two things I could not find counted anywhere. Everything below was checked from India, against the en-us pages, in USD. Exam pricing in INR differs, Azure account availability varies by country, and both vendors have been moving these terms, so the date stamp is doing real work.

What a brand new AWS account actually gets you

Not twelve free months. Whatever you read last year, that tier does not exist for an account opened today. AWS’s free tier page now reads: “When you create a new AWS Free Tier account, you get $100 in credits immediately. As you explore key services, you can earn up to $100 more.”

The clock matters more than the credits. That same page says “The account closes on its own 6 months after you open it or when your credits run out, whichever comes first”, and the Billing User Guide is blunter about what closing means: “After your free account plan expires, your account closes automatically, and you lose access to your resources and data. AWS retains your content for 90 days before permanently deleting your account and all associated resources.” Sign up in January, drift away, come back in August, and your lab work is on a 90-day timer you never saw start.

There is a second timer, and it catches people in week five. AWS’s IAM guide now treats root MFA as a requirement rather than a suggestion: “Users must register MFA within 35 days of their first sign-in attempt to access the AWS Management Console if MFA is not already enabled.” Skip the banner, and on day 36 you are locked out of the console you were practising in.

What survives all this is the always-free set, which AWS puts at “30+ AWS services are always free within monthly usage limits on both the Free and Paid plans”. Real, and smaller than it sounds.

Microsoft removed the thing everyone recommended

The standard beginner advice, which I gave people myself in 2024, was to start on Azure because Microsoft Learn had sandboxes. A free Azure environment, running inside the training module, no card and no subscription. It is gone. Microsoft’s training FAQ now describes them in the past tense, “The Microsoft Learn sandboxes were free environments used to explore Azure and other products through Microsoft Learn training modules”, and then answers the obvious follow-up: “Sandboxes are no longer available. To complete exercises in training modules, you’ll need access to an Azure subscription.”

There was no press release and no changelog entry that I could find. The clearest public trace is a question on Microsoft Q&A posted on 12 February 2026 by an AZ-104 learner in Madagascar, who found the sandbox missing and could not create a free Azure account in their country either. The answer, same day, confirmed it and pointed back at the FAQ.

An Azure free account still looks generous on paper. Microsoft’s free account page offers “$200 credit to use on Azure services within 30 days”, “Free monthly amounts of 20+ popular services for 12 months (new Azure customers only)” and “Free monthly amounts of 65+ always-free services”. The catch is at the door, in that page’s own FAQ: “All you need is a phone number, a credit card or a debit card (non-prepaid), and a Microsoft account or a GitHub account.”

aws vs azure which is easier to learn in August 2026?

Azure is still the smaller exam and AWS is now the cheaper place to touch something. Microsoft’s AZ-900 study guide names 26 products against 128 in AWS’s Cloud Practitioner guide, which is the lighter memorisation load by some distance. But Microsoft retired its free sandbox, and AWS Educate still hands out labs on an email address, so of the two, only AWS offers hands-on practice without a payment card.

What it costs to get hands on keyboard, checked 20 August 2026

I counted the named services in both exam guides

“Azure has fewer services to remember” gets repeated a lot. I had never seen anyone put a number on it, so I did.

Method, so you can redo it. I pulled the official CLF-C02 exam guide PDF, ran pdftotext -layout over it, sliced the block between the headings “In-scope AWS services and features” and “Out-of-scope AWS services and features”, dropped the page footers and the 17 category headings, merged continuation lines that start lowercase, and counted what was left. The number on 20 August 2026 was 128, from Amazon Athena to AWS Storage Gateway. AWS itself says of that list: “This list is non-exhaustive and is subject to change.”

Then the AZ-900 study guide, whose outline is stamped “Skills measured as of July 20, 2026”. I counted distinct brand-named Microsoft or Azure products in its skills block: Entra ID, Entra Domain Services, Conditional Access, Defender for Cloud, Purview, Arc, Policy, Advisor, Service Health, Monitor, Log Analytics, Application Insights, Resource Manager, Cloud Shell, CLI, PowerShell, Storage Explorer, File Sync, AzCopy, Migrate, Data Box, DNS, VPN Gateway, ExpressRoute, Virtual Desktop, Virtual Machine Scale Sets. Twenty-six.

128 against 26 is close to five-fold, and it is not quite apples to apples. AWS publishes an enumerated appendix; Microsoft names products inline inside a skills outline, so the shapes differ. Read it as named service surface in each vendor’s own exam guide, not as proof that AZ-900 covers five times less. Directionally, though, the folklore turns out to be right. For scale on the AWS side: its public pricing index listed 268 distinct billable offer codes when I pulled it on 20 August 2026, against the marketing line of over 200 services. That is 268 things that can appear on a bill, which is also 268 things to get lost in.

Half of Microsoft’s official AZ-900 path is the half that stopped being free

This is the number I care about most. Microsoft’s official AZ-900 curriculum is now a four-part “Introduction to Cloud Infrastructure” series. I pulled the public Microsoft Learn catalog API on 20 August 2026, no auth, 846 learning paths in the file, and summed the four Azure-fundamentals path uids: 20 modules, 613 minutes, 10.2 hours. The fourth path, “Apply Azure skills in guided projects”, is 8 modules and 308 minutes on its own. 50.2% of the runtime.

The modules endpoint gave me the other half. It carries 3,467 modules, each with a units array, so I counted the units whose identifier marks them as an exercise. Across those 20 modules there are 158 units, 26 of them hands-on exercises, and all 26 sit inside the eight guided-project modules.

So the shape of it: you can read 305 minutes of Microsoft’s recommended AZ-900 path for free, and then the exercises begin. The guided project on deploying a static website with Blob Storage, for instance, carries a “Get started with Azure” block offering pay as you go or a 30-day trial. No sandbox button anywhere on the page. A card requirement now sits in the middle of the curriculum Microsoft recommends.

Worth saying: certification is the screen, not the interview. Once AZ-900 or Cloud Practitioner is on the resume, the failure mode shifts to talking about VPCs out loud under time pressure, which is a different muscle. LastRound AI’s free plan comes with 15 credits a month that reset each month, enough to run real practice rounds before you pay anything, and Auto-Apply covers the volume side once the certificate is actually on there. If you want the question bank first, our AWS cloud interview questions post is the better starting point.

The exam mechanics still favour AZ-900, with one asterisk

Both exams sit at the same bar. The CLF-C02 guide scores on a scale that runs from 100 to 1,000 and states that “The minimum passing score is 700.” It uses a compensatory model, so you pass the exam as a whole rather than each section. Microsoft’s scoring page says “All technical exam scores are reported on a scale of 1 to 1,000. A passing score is 700 or greater.” Same number, different route to it.

Past that, AZ-900 is the lighter sitting. Microsoft’s exam duration page gives fundamentals exams 45 minutes of exam time and 65 minutes of seat time, and says most of its exams “typically contain between 40-60 questions”. CLF-C02 is 65 questions in 90 minutes. If you are mapping out the wider ladder afterwards, our AWS certifications guide covers what sits above the foundational tier.

The asterisk is a rule people find out on exam day. Microsoft’s in-exam access to Microsoft Learn “is only available on role-based exams, not fundamentals”. An AZ-104 candidate can look things up mid-exam. An AZ-900 candidate cannot, which quietly removes the thing that makes the role-based Azure exams feel gentle.

One more oddity. Microsoft does not print a USD price for AZ-900 on its own certification page. All it says is “Price based on the country or region in which the exam is proctored.” So any USD figure you have seen for AZ-900 came from somewhere other than Microsoft, most likely the Pearson VUE checkout. AWS prints “100 USD” on the exam overview. Minor, but if you are budgeting from vendor pages alone, one vendor tells you and the other makes you start a booking to find out.

Where I would start, and what I am unsure about

Have a card and thirty spare evenings? Azure is still the faster certificate. Fewer named products, a shorter exam, $200 to burn inside a month. No card, or you are sixteen, or your bank’s cards get rejected at Azure signup? AWS Educate, and it is not close. AWS’s page for it says “Learners as young as 13 can register for AWS Educate with just an email address, gaining access to free hands-on labs to learn and practice cloud skills in real-time.”

Where I am less confident: I am not sure AWS’s self-closing six-month account is worse for a beginner than Azure’s 30-day credit. It might be better. Six months under a hard cap with no possibility of a surprise bill is a kinder place to make mistakes than a live pay-as-you-go subscription with a card attached, which is what an Azure learner is running on day 31. I have not put a beginner through both for six months, so treat that as an opinion rather than a finding.

The AWS-first crowd does have the market behind it, for whatever that is worth here. Stack Overflow’s 2025 developer survey put AWS at 43.3% and Azure at 26.3% among all respondents. That is a hiring signal, not a learning-difficulty signal, and it feeds a different calculation that our cloud certification ROI post works through properly.

Before either, though, try this. Open the AZ-900 guided-projects path and the AWS Educate lab catalogue in two tabs and see which one lets you touch a running resource in the next ten minutes. That is the ease-of-learning test that matters, and it takes less time than reading another comparison of the two.