Inside the Briefcase
Amazon Web Services Launches Free Usage Tier
October 27, 2010 No CommentsSOURCE: Sys-Con Media
Amazon’s cloud business says that starting November 1 new – repeat new – customers, described as anyone from college kids to Fortune 500 developers, can run a free EC2 instance for a year, and leverage the free usage across Amazon’s other services like S3, Elastic Block Store, Elastic Load Balancing and AWS data transfer.
It says the move will let developers launch new applications, broaden their AWS smarts or gain hands-on familiarity with the services.
Maybe it’s as simple as getting more people cloud-bound on its widgetry or maybe it’s the competition or maybe it’s Amazon pushing the cloud like a drug dealer – get ’em hooked they stay hooked.
AWS VP Adam Selipsky said in a statement, “We can’t wait to see what great ideas are set in motion now that it’s free to experiment and launch production applications in the AWS cloud.”
Amazon apparently figures if the new applications spike in popularity, after the free year they’ll have to scale to its standard pay-as-you-go pricing.
Free is obviously relative. Amazon means free as in 750 hours a month of a micro Linux EC2 instance (there are 744 hours in a 31-day calendar month); 750 hours a month of an Amazon Elastic Load Balancer; 10GB a month of Elastic Block Storage; 5GB a month of S3 Storage and 30GB a month of Internet data transfer (15GB of inbound data transfer and 15GB of outbound data transfer across all services).
It’s also promising some indefinitely free widgetry: to wit, 25 machine hours a month of Amazon SimpleDB and 100,000 requests a month of its Simple Queue Service, 100,000 requests per month, 100,000 notifications over HTTP a month and 1,000 notifications over e-mail a month for Amazon Simple Notification Service.
