Amazon Offers Free Access To EC2 Cloud

Amazon is looking to tempt those businesses considering the cloud, by offering a year’s free access to its Amazon Web Services (AWS).

According to Amazon, from 1 November users will be able to run a free Amazon EC2 instance for a year. They will also be able to utilise a new free usage tier for Amazon S3, Amazon Elastic Block Store, Amazon Elastic Load Balancing, and AWS data transfer.

“AWS’s free usage tier can be used for anything you want to run in the cloud: launch new applications, test existing applications in the cloud, or simply gain hands-on experience with AWS,” said Amazon.

Kickstart Development?

“We’re excited to introduce a free usage tier for new AWS customers to help them get started on AWS,” said Adam Selipsky, Vice President, Amazon Web Services.

“Everyone from entrepreneurial college students to developers at Fortune 500 companies can now launch new applications at zero expense and with the peace of mind that they can instantly scale to accommodate growth,” said Selipsky. “We can’t wait to see what great ideas are set in motion now that it’s free to experiment and launch production applications in the AWS cloud.”

Specifically with this offer of a free usage tier, the user will get up to 750 hours of Amazon EC2 Linux Micro Instance usage each month – enough hours to run continuously for the month.

Other monthly entitlements include 750 hours of an Elastic Load Balancer plus 15GB data processing per month; 10GB of Amazon Elastic Block Storage, plus 1 million I/Os, 1GB of snapshot storage, 10,000 snapshot Get Requests and 1,000 snapshot Put Requests; 5GB of Amazon S3 storage, 20,000 Get Requests, and 2,000 Put Requests; 30GB per of internet data transfer; 25 Amazon SimpleDB Machine Hours and 1GB of Storage etc.

“In addition to these services, the AWS Management Console is available at no charge to help you build and manage your application on AWS,” said Amazon.

Private, Not Public

It seems that Amazon is looking to attract new developers to the platform so that they will launch new applications.

“With the new free AWS usage tier, developers will be able to launch applications at no cost,” Amazon said. “If their new application spikes in popularity, it will seamlessly scale and run on AWS’s inexpensive, pay-as-you-go, standard pricing that is much less than traditional computing costs.”

Amazon is also looking to attract new businesses to the service. Whilst private clouds deployments have increased, the wide-scale adoption of public cloud services by businesses is experiencing slower growth with organisations citing security concerns, among others.

Cloud Webinar

Indeed, earlier this month Benjamin Grubin, Novell Director of Data Center Management, warned that too much enterprise IT was simply not ready to be moved outside the perimeter, outside to public clouds. “Public clouds were going to take some amount of time to be mature. They weren’t there yet,” he said.

Meanwhile Peter Judge, editor of eWEEK Europe UK, is hosting a webinar later this week on the topic of cloud computing, exploring whether the cloud is actually creating a better IT environment. The webinar is part of BrightTalk’s Cloud Infrastructure virtual summit.