New Free Tier of Amazon Web Services

Amazon.com's Web Services (AWS) division for has just announced a bundle of free services that they'll provide to developers absolutely free for one year. If you're not familiar with Amazon Web Services, it's a set of cloud-based tools that allows developers and ultimately businesses build scalable web-based solutions. It's very cool and you probably use sites powered by AWS without even know it.

We're only touching the surface of course in this post so read more about the services provided here and check out some case studies here. Included in the free tier of services are:

750 hours of Amazon EC2 Linux Micro Instance usage (613 MB of memory and 32-bit and 64-bit platform support) – enough hours to run continuously each month
750 hours of an Elastic Load Balancer plus 15 GB data processing
10 GB of Amazon Elastic Block Storage, plus 1 million I/Os, 1 GB of snapshot storage, 10,000 snapshot Get Requests and 1,000 snapshot Put Requests
5 GB of Amazon S3 storage, 20,000 Get Requests, and 2,000 Put Requests
30 GB per of internet data transfer (15 GB of data transfer “in” and 15 GB of data transfer “out” across all services except Amazon CloudFront)
25 Amazon SimpleDB Machine Hours and 1 GB of Storage
100,000 Requests of Amazon Simple Queue Service
100,000 Requests, 100,000 HTTP notifications and 1,000 email notifications for Amazon Simple Notification Service

You need a credit card to sign up and if you go over the limits you will of course be charged the usage fees. You can sign up now but the free usage program doesn't go live until November 1st, 2010. Thanks goes to TechCrunch.com.