Servers for Nothing, Bits for Free

In the last year or two we’ve added free tiers of service to Amazon SQS, Amazon SNS, and Amazon SimpleDB. We have learned that developers like to be able to try out our services without having to pay to do so. In many cases, they have created non-trivial applications that can run entirely within the free tier of a particular service.

Today, we’re going to go a lot farther. How far? Really far!

Effective today (November 1, 2010), we’re opening up a new free tier for all new AWS developers. Here’s what you get each month when you combine the existing free tier with this announcement:

• 750 hours of free time on an Amazon EC2 Micro instance running Linux. You can use this to run one of the Amazon Linux AMIs or any other non-paid Linux AMI. This time cannot be used to run the new SUSE Linux AMIs, the IBM AMIs, or the Microsoft Windows AMIs.
• 10 GB/months of Elastic Block Storage, 1 GB of snapshot storage, and 1 million I/O requests. This is enough space for the Amazon Linux AMI among others.
• 750 hours of Elastic Load Balancer time and 15 GB of data transfer through it.
• 5 GB/months of Amazon S3 storage, along with 20K GETs and 2K PUTs.
• 15 GB of internet data transfer out, and 15 GB of internet data transfer in.
• 100K Amazon SQS requests.
• 100K Amazon SNS requests, along with 100K HTTP notifications and 1K email notifications.
• 25 Amazon SimpleDB machine hours and 1 GB of storage.

In plain English, you get everything that you need to build and deploy a very functional web application and run it full time, for free! The AWS Management Console and Auto Scaling are already available at no charge, of course.

You need to send us cookies, put an AWS sticker on your cat, write a blog post about this, create an AWS account with a valid credit card attached, in case your usage in a given month exceeds what we’ve made available in the free tier.

You will be able to see what pay-as-you-go really means, and you will be able to get some valuable experience with AWS.

Your free usage starts on the day that you create your AWS account and ends one year after that. Accounts are limited to one per customer.

You can get started by reading the EC2 Getting Started Guide or my new AWS book.

We are very interested in learning more about the uses that you find for these new resources. In fact, we’re curious what folks are working on this week. If you create a cool tool, a great application, or a compelling web site that runs entirely within the free tier,send us a note by this Friday. You can leave a comment on this post or drop us a line at awseditor@amazon.com . We’d love to hear from you.

— Jeff;