Amazon RDS Free Usage Tier

The AWS Free Tier is only available to existing AWS customers who have signed-up for Free Tier after October 20, 2010 and new AWS customers, and is available for 12 months following your AWS sign-up date. When your free usage expires or if your application use exceeds the free usage tiers, you simply pay standard, pay-as-you-go service rates (see Amazon RDS pricing page for full pricing details). Restrictions apply; see offer terms for more details.

The free usage tier applies across all AWS regions: US East (Northern Virginia), US West (Oregon), US West (Northern California), EU (Ireland), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), and South America (Sao Paulo). Your usage is calculated each month across all regions and automatically applied to your bill. For example, you will receive 750 Micro DB Instance hours for free across all of the Regions, not 750 hours per Region. Note that free usage does not accumulate.

Why Amazon RDS

Deploying and managing databases is one of the most complex, time-consuming, and expensive activities in IT. Amazon RDS removes this complexity by automating many of the undifferentiated but time-consuming and critical administrative tasks such as hardware provisioning, software installation and patching, storage management, and backups for disaster recovery. This enables developers and database administrators to free up time to focus on innovation. As your application needs grow, you can scale the compute capacity easily.

The service handles time-consuming database management tasks so you can pursue higher value application development. If you are managing your own database deployments today, you can move to Amazon RDS and gain the following benefits:

More on Key Features

• Data Durability and Disaster Recovery – Turned on by default, the automated backup feature of Amazon RDS enables point-in-time recovery for your DB Instance. Amazon RDS will back up your database and transaction logs and store both for a user-specified retention period. This allows you to restore your DB Instance to any second during your retention period, up to the last five minutes. Your automatic backup retention period can be configured to up to 35 days.

• Manageability – Amazon RDS automatically patches your OS software and enables you to automatically upgrade your database software. Additionally, Amazon RDS provides full visibility into your CPU, disk and memory utilization via the AWS Management Console.

• Scalability – Using a few clicks on the AWS Management Console, you can simply scale up the instance type from Small to Large, Double Extra Large or Quadruple Extra Large. NOTE: Using the scale compute feature will consume capacity beyond the free tier usage capacity. You will incur standard, pay-as-you-go rates for this additional capacity.