Thursday, October 21, 2010

Amazon Rolls Out Free EC2 Instances

Looking to attract new developers to the firm's cloud-based services, Amazon Web Services, Amazon's cloud and web services arm, said Thursday that it is rolling out a program which will provide a free, Amazon EC2 instance for a year to new users, and also provide free usage of Amazon S3, Amazon Elastic Block Store, Amazon Elastic Load Balancing, and AWS data transfer. According to Amazon, the free usage tier for its services is aimed at helping developers launch new applications, broaden their AWS knowledge, or just to gain hands-on familiarity with those services, which are heavily used by online web sites to scale out their applications.

Amazon said it would provide 750 hours per month of its micro Linux Amazon EC2 instance usage; 750 hours per month of Amazon Elastic Load Balancer; 10GB per month of Amazon Elastic Block Storage; 5 GB per month of Amazon S3 Storage; 30 GB per month of internet data transfer; 25 Machine Hours per month of Amazon SimpleDB; 100,000 Requests per month of Amazon Simple Queue Service; and 100,000 Requests per month for Amazon Simple Notification Service, all for free to developers.

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