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;

 

Comments

[Juanan]

Hi,

what a good deal! :-) One question: I created my account yesterday, and according to the terms and conditions of this program :

http://aws.amazon.com/free/terms/

"Only accounts created after October 20, 2010 are eligible for the Offer. The Offer does not apply to any use of the AWS services prior to November 1, 2010."

I should be a candidate to try the tiny AWS server for free, but in my account, in the details tab, can't notice the offer. Are we supposed to have a discount at the end of this month? Is there any icon or piece of information that we can use to verify that the discount will be applied to our account?

Thanks in advance.

[Juanan]

Just to clarify, I meant the micro server edition (not the tiny)
and I was also wondering if we have to use the US region or is it possible to apply using an EU account?

[Itai]

I'm actually up for putting stickers around the house if you don't mind sending me some :P

[Krisajenkins]

Oh cool. Cool, cool, cool. Supercool!

Sorry - simplistic reaction, but it sums up what I want to say. :-)

[LJ]

boooo. why only new users. why couldn't previous users also be allowed to get a free account for a year..
or at least users who haven't used ec2 extensively (i.e. have never fired up their own instance yet).

[Tester]

Hi,

I'm yours client for 1,5-2 years. I only use s3 because of my backup software(JungleDisk). Option of creating micro instance is so amazing for me, that I would like to try. Can I or can I not?

I'm customer for 1,5-2 years, but I've never used EC2 before.

Cheers

[jdonnici]

I'm with the others... making this available to only NEW accounts is very un-Amazon-like. I created an AWS account on October 15 -- just a week or so before the cutoff -- so that I could experiment with EC2, EBS, and SimpleDB on a very small level. Essentially, learn how to deal with AMIs, what's involved with connecting the "bricks" together, etc. The free tier would be perfect for that but despite not doing anything with AWS until after the cutoff, I don't qualify.

Rather than looking at "new users" as those who haven't used AWS (processing hours, storage size, billing threshold), the cutoff deadline leaves out people like me who signed up to tinker and learn about AWS but simply didn't wait long enough. For those who qualify, the free tier makes AWS the "default choice". For someone who's needs are very light but doesn't qualify for the free tier, there's no reason not to also experiment with other cloud providers at the same level.

[João]

I <3 you, amazon

[fabiopedrosa]

agree with LJ. I have a never-used account, but can't use this because it was created before date...

[Alex]

I too signed up for my AWS account prior to the cut-off date but have never actually used it. Amazon need to draw the line somewhere and unfortunately we're on the wrong side of it.

[liqwei]

Why not give the same free service to the exist user?

I am a Chinese developer,and interest in aws for a long time, and sign up a accout at October, just before a few days of the free service publish, but I sign up the aws product after November 01, so I can't enjoy the free service, and I feel very unfortunate!

So can you give the same free service to the exist user? or give the user who sign up the aws products after November 01 not the time who sign up aws account the same free service?

As you can predict, there are thousands of developers like me or small it companies in China want to use the advanced cloud aws products.

And my aws account is same as the email writed below, hope to hear from you soon!

best wishes for you! Thank you!