Amazon Web Services (AWS) have announced the launch of a free usage tier. The offer, for new customers only, starts from November 1 and continues for a year. AWS is a subsidiary of Amazon providing remote computing services to many.  Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, Amazon Elastic Block Store, Amazon Elastic Load Balancing and AWS data transfer are among the free services offered.  Amazon listed the features of the free offering as follows:

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

This news reassures that the Cloud is here to stay. The free offering shall remove hesitation (especially from financial perspective) for potential entrepreneurs. Developers can now experiment and test new ventures with lesser costs as remote computing service subscription costs are wavered by Amazon. The free offering might sound like Amazon incurring opportunity cost.

But, in my opinion, it will actually attract more developers to Amazon Web Services. And if the application gains popularity and crosses the freely available capacity threshold, it would be a win-win for Amazon, they get a new customer. Overall it’s good for the entrepreneurial spirit in the Cloud industry.  Not to mention, good marketing for Amazon.  The company has always been competitve with pricing for its products, and that’s been the case for its Web Services as well.  In fact, Amazon recently dropped prices on some of its server options, and recently launched Micro Instances for smaller apps.