I am an instructor who wants to be able to use Azure in several classes in our program to promote learning. It has come to my attention that to activate a new Azure pass subscription, you have to have a new email address. Apparently you cannot apply a new AzureU subscription to an existing account.

I am, therefore, concerned:

First: I will have to rebuild my class infrastructure each time my subscription needs to be refreshed.
Second: I will have to approach my institution for a new email address each year.
Three: Or I can use a special (concocted) public email address or something to get around it but then my login will not be through the University's federation services and so I will not really see what students see.
Fourth: Students who take multiple classes in our program that use Azure may have a problem using the same email account. I can and, I guess, will have them use some kind of personal email address but that means extra documentation and such for me.

I don’t really understand the policy here. Why would Microsoft want an instructor to face these concerns when the goal is to get your products out there where students can use them?

Azure offered a 30 day Trial (too short) in which I had no time to finish the on-line course. To make Azure more attractive and more users to join and to learn how to use it properly with proper training is to offer to Office365 Home subscribers perpetual limited system time.
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How could this work:
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Office365 offers 5 licenses, 60 min Skype and 1TB Disk Space.
Azure could be offered to only 1 of the users to try and train as long as the Office365 subscription is paid.
So for example there would be a 60 day Azure usage (for private use) but at the end of that time ALL Virtual Systems would be wiped clean and the subscriber would have to start everything from the beginning in a circular fashion.
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The 1TB offered on the Office365 Home Subscription would be reduced to 200GB and the rest of the Cloud Space, to be used with Azure setups. The Azure setups would have minimal limitations just enough to run the different Virtual Machines and Services but it would benefit the subscriber to have time to train and learn.
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If for example the user would need more time on his current Azure 60 day setup, there would be an extra 30 day limited fee to use it and then everything would be wiped out and the subscriber would have to start from the beginning.
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It's unfortunate that time offered is too short but this would increase the number of subscribers to use Azure.

Idempotent JSON based resource manager templates are a great idea. However, sophisticated deployments use numerous sub-components over and over. JSON schema understands this is a requirement for building real world JSON where elements repeat in different places, and has a $ref mechanism - like the variables and parameters, but a way to define a JSON object and use it elsewhere, repeatedly.

This would allow, for example, a security rule to be defined in one place, and used in several NSGs.

Consider, for example, a classic three tier DMZ, App Server and DB Server Zone, implemented with NSGs. The zones clearly have different rules, so a clean implementation has 3 subnets and three NSGs. Now tighten the system down and block ALL Internet Outbound traffic. Much more secure. But wait - we need dns, ntp, access to outside services, etc etc. These are COMMON to all three NSGs, but have to be DUPLICATED in each because there's no reference mechanism that allows me to define them once, and incorporate them by reference into JSON objects or arrays.

Anytime you start copying code (or data in data drive implementations) you know there's a SERIOUS flaw.

This is a big Whops! and would be a huge value.

Again, you guys are using JSON Schema, look at the $ref mechanism and make it work for use in objects and arrays) and you're golden.