Amazon Web Services LLC (AWS) announced that developers and businesses will be able to take advantage of a new free usage tier for a full year.

Starting next month, new AWS customers will be able to run a free Amazon EC2 instance for a year, while also leveraging a new free usage tier for Amazon S3, Amazon Elastic Block Store, Amazon Elastic Load Balancing, and AWS data transfer.

The change will enable developers to launch new applications, broaden their AWS knowledge, or simply gain hands-on familiarity with the services -- all while incurring no charges.

Amazon Web Services Vice President Adam Selipsky expressed the company's excitement in introducing the free usage tier for new AWS customers, as this would help them get started on AWS.

Selipsky said: "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. 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."

Developers will be able to launch applications at no cost with the new free AWS usage tier. If their new application reacches popularity, it will seamlessly scale and run on AWS's standard pricing which cost much less than traditional computing costs.

Here are the highlights of AWS's new free offering. All are free for one year, except the last three which are free indefinitely:

  • 750 hours per month of micro Linux Amazon EC2 instance usage -- enough to run continuously (there are approximately 750 hours in a month)
  • 750 hours per month of an Amazon Elastic Load Balancer
  • 10 GB per month of Amazon Elastic Block Storage
  • 5 GB per month of Amazon S3 Storage
  • 30 GB per month of internet data transfer (15 GB of data transfer "in" and 15 GB of data transfer "out" across all services)
  • 25 Machine Hours per month of Amazon SimpleDB
  • 100,000 Requests per month of Amazon Simple Queue Service
  • 100,000 Requests per month, 100,000 Notifications over HTTP per month, and 1,000 Notifications over Email per month for Amazon Simple Notification Service

To learn more about AWS's free offering, visit their website.

Disclaimer: The article is lifted from a press release from Amazon.