Amazon Web Services Offers Free Cloud Access

Starting November 1, new AWS users will be able to take advantage of many services for a year for free, including enough hours to run an Amazon EC2 Linux Instance continuously each month.

Mashable, Blake Robinson, Oct 21, 2010

Amazon.com just revealed a free usage tier for its Amazon Web Services (AWS). The announcement was just a footnote to its Q3 2010 earnings call, but it has broad implications for Amazon and the future of the Internet.

Starting November 1, new AWS users will be able to take advantage of the following services for a year for free:

750 hours of Amazon EC2 Linux Micro Instance usage (613 MB of memory and 32-bit and 64-bit platform support) - enough hours to run continuously each month
750 hours of an Elastic Load Balancer plus 15 GB data processing
10 GB of Amazon Elastic Block Storage, plus 1 million I/Os, 1 GB of snapshot storage, 10,000 snapshot Get Requests and 1,000 snapshot Put Requests
5 GB of Amazon S3 storage, 20,000 Get Requests, and 2,000 Put Requests
30 GB per of internet data transfer (15 GB of data transfer "in" and 15 GB of data transfer "out" across all services except Amazon CloudFront)
25 Amazon SimpleDB Machine Hours and 1 GB of Storage
100,000 Requests of Amazon Simple Queue Service
100,000 Requests, 100,000 HTTP notifications and 1,000 email notifications for Amazon Simple Notification Service

Amazon Web Services already has far reaching influence. Its suite of products is deeply integrated into everything from web services like Tumblr to products from software companies like AutoDesk.

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