
Amazon AWS Free Usage Tier - wave
http://aws.amazon.com/free/
======
cperciva
I think it would be better to make these available to everybody, not just to
new users.

I talk to people at Amazon frequently enough to know that they don't take
existing customers for granted... but doing things like this certainly doesn't
help with their image in that respect.

~~~
kwamenum86
It is a marketing campaign designed to generate reg. Marketing is about
getting the right message to the right people in a way that they prefer to
hear that message. In this case existing users are not the right people.
People who have been thinking about trying AWS but don't want to shell out any
cash are the right people.

It is not really alienation. They are investing money in converting people to
their platform. Offering this to existing users makes no sense from that
perspective. It is pretty standard across many industries to offer exclusive
deals to new customers.

~~~
dkarl
_Marketing is about getting the right message to the right people in a way
that they prefer to hear that message. In this case existing users are not the
right people._

That's why it's a mistake. Existing users (the wrong people) hear the message
much louder than potential users, and possibly in greater numbers.

~~~
blantonl
I'm sorry, but I'm unable to understand why an existing paying user should in
any way, shape, or form expect to participate in a promotion to attract new
users to the platform. No matter how you look at it, this is a promotion for
new users. Period.

These expectations are analogous to you being a paying member on some
platform, and they announce a "30 days free" promotion for new members, and
you demanding that you should get to participate in that promotion.
Shenanigans.

And just because AWS is pay as you go doesn't make this any different.

~~~
detst
Why is that "shenanigans"? I've asked to be put on promotional pricing many
times as an existing user of other companies and you know what... they often
give it to me. Why? Because I'm free to give my money to someone else.

It's a way of showing appreciation and that they don't take you for granted.
Period. (sorry, I had to)

If you aren't negotiating better terms for recurring services, then you are
giving money away. Promotions are just a nice bit of leverage in negotiations.

~~~
sp4rki
So you believe every Amazon customer should get in the promotion of X amount
of free service for a whole year without any retention mechanism?

In comparison if you ask your internet provider to bump you up from 1mbps to
2mbps (or to lower the price from 50 bucks to 40) because they have a
promotion for new users, and they give it to you, providing you sign a
contract for another 12 months, is not equivalent to telling the internet
provider that because they are offering a free year of service (up to lets say
5 gigs of downstream bandwidth) to new customers you should do to and without
a contract specifying that you're staying with the company afterwards.

------
timf
Tucked away in the offer terms is:

 _You will become ineligible for the Offer if, during any 3 month period, you
do not [..] (b) incur fees for use of the service that exceeds the free usage
amount provided under the Offer_

So it is free as long as you exceed the free quotas. Hmm.

[ <http://aws.amazon.com/free/terms/> ]

~~~
ceejayoz
They appear to have deleted that from the page.

~~~
timf
Cool. Looks like Shlomo got someone to investigate:
<http://twitter.com/ShlomoSwidler/status/28063124182>

------
seldo
This is mind-blowingly great, not only for them -- compete with Google App
engine, and get people hooked on AWS early -- but also for young
entrepreneurs, who can get a professional dev env for $0 and a year to see if
their idea works.

I think this will also open the gates to developers outside the US --
$50/month for hosting might not seem too much to an American, but in other
countries it can be a real barrier.

~~~
slowpoison
Having dealt with GAE for a while, I can say that EC2 and GAE don't create
much competition for each other. Granted that user-facing result is the same -
applications, yet both are a completely different model of doing applications.
To that extent, I imagine developers choosing their respective platform out of
these two will have different mindsets or requirements.

In GAE, you have the privilege of bypassing the administrative stuff -
creating/deleting/configuring instances, choosing software, amongst other
things. Quite useful for some app categories, like web-apps/web-services for
verticals, where you want to concentrate on the business logic and the rest
doesn't matter as long as the app works.

EC2 is great too, and attracts developers who require more freedom in terms of
software architecture, and choice of components, but comes with a the non-
trivial administrative costs. (I do imagine EC2 consultants being in-demand,
sooner or later.)

I think both models have potential to succeed, and should be able to nicely
co-exist. This free-to-jumpstart approach is perhaps targeted just to stir up
AWS demand.

~~~
netcan
There are many instances of overlap. An Amazon user will use that and an GAE
user will choose GAE for essentially the same projects a user of neither may
consider both. "Toy projects" will often be in the last category. The parent
is saying that subsequent projects might be in the first categories.

------
seldo
Of course, any moment now there will be a blog post from somebody who signed
up for 300 disposable credit cards and used 300 disposable email addresses to
get a supercomputer for free.

~~~
d2viant
If you have a Bank of America credit card, you can just use the ShopSafe
feature. Log in to your account online and you can generate temporary card
numbers to purchase something online (allocating as much allowable spending as
you want), so you don't have to expose your real card number online. These are
temporary numbers that get a new number, new expiration and new CCV...but
behind the scenes they're tied to your real card, so they show up on your bill
like normal.

~~~
jedberg
I tried that once. They cut me off after 5 temp numbers in one day. I wasn't
even trying to cheat -- I was just buying a bunch of stuff from different
vendors.

------
gfodor
Sadly, there is one thing missing. They need to allow you to run a micro
instance of RDS. Then the circle would be complete and you could deploy a full
application for free to the cloud. (The problem now is you'd have to run the
database yourself on your one micro, which is do-able but quite lame.)

~~~
ShabbyDoo
Perhaps Amazon would argue that they're giving you some free units of
SimpleDB, but access to a small MySQL environment would certainly allow a huge
number of open source apps to be deployed without modification.

------
tyrelb
What is the dollar value of all this free stuff?

~~~
seldo
750 hours EC2 linux micro = $15

750 hours ELB = $18.75

15GB ELB data processing = $0.12

10GB EBS, 1 month = $1.00

1 million EBS I/Os = $0.10

1GB snapshot = ? (varies a lot, but less than a dollar)

5GB S3, 2000 PUT, 20000 GET = $0.79

30GB transfer ~= $4.20

The remaining items are always free.

Total: $39.96

(Marketing value: priceless)

FYI, you can calculate any bill here:
<http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/calc5.html>

~~~
Terretta
available for 12 months: $479.52

~~~
seldo
Oh of course, thank you.

------
melvinram
Wow this is remarkable. This is simply the best time in history to be starting
a new business, particularly an Internet based business. The barrier to entry
is extremely low and the ability to change & improve is as flexible as Mr.
Fantastic.

~~~
ph0rque
_This is simply the best time in history to be starting a new business..._

... except in the future, when it will be even easier :~)

~~~
shykes
From wikipedia: "History [...] is the study of the human past"

------
tibbon
I'm curious how Linode and Slicehost will respond. This is pretty hard to
beat.

~~~
lsc
this is my thought/fear too, as I'm in the same space.

Now, I tried 'free' before and I just about lost my shirt. I got a bunch of
jerks signing up with fake names and then running up my bandwidth bills with
torrents, then at the end of the month, nobody, ah, "converted" so _I_ am not
going to respond with 'free'

One of my responses could be to push my larger domains (which are quite a bit
cheaper than the competition) or continue focusing on the international
market. (I haven't read the fine print of the amazon offer, but I'll eat my
hat if they give free accounts to, say, Brazilians.)

So yeah; my current attitude is "wait and see" - as of today I'm still selling
out servers as fast as I can put them up... if that changes, I'll change
something.

As for slicehost/linode, my personal guess is that they will both tout their
substantial customer support advantages over amazon.

~~~
mahmud
If you make your services any cheaper, I will personally unsubscribe, since I
will no longer think you're in it to make a living, but offering a charity.

<http://prgmr.com/xen/>

You really have everyone beat on price, by a mile. Too bad, there aren't
enough cheap, unix-gurus to make use of it :-) People these days want an ajax
console with drop-down menus for shell commands.

~~~
lsc
hah. well, I am making a living off of it.

the thing of it is, really, prices for this sort of thing should be falling
with Moore's law, right?

Also, there seems to be enough cheap UNIX people to keep me busy... I've been
selling out hardware about as fast as I can put it up. at this point the
bottleneck is pretty solidly me.

Of course, I'm charging prices that would be pretty high margin if I was 'at
scale' and, well, I'm not even close, at the moment, so I don't have as much
wiggle room as I would have otherwise, but rest assured, it's profitable, at
least when I don't screw it up. I've set a (I think realistic) goal to double
in the next 6 months, which

~~~
pdelgallego
The 8$/month machine sounds very interesting.

I'm quite new to VPS. I recently deployed a couple of project for customer in
Linode. I am very happy with them, but at the same time, I have some hobby
projects of my own that I dont want to host in a 20USD/month machine.

How are your VPSs compare to Linode?

~~~
lsc
they have better CPU than I do (and this is unlikely to change... but you
know? very few things my customers do are CPU bound.)

I also give you fewer VCPU on the lower-end instances. they give you 4, I give
you 1. the idea here is to optimize for the worst case (if there is
contention, and you have 4 vcpus, that's more context switching and more cache
flushes. on the other hand, cpu is usually mostly idle, and in that case more
vcpu is more performance. My large instances have more vcpu.) I'm
experimenting with my vcpu policy and may bring that more in line with linode.
But really, I regard this as relatively unimportant because VPSs are rarely
CPU bound.

Our disk quality is likely about the same (I use 7500rpm "enterprise" sata,
which is about as good as sata gets without getting into the expensive 10K
stuff, and if linode was using 10K disk, they'd be advertising the fact.) My
ratio of disk to ram is 4 disks in raid 1+0 for every 32GiB ram/8 cores I'm
not sure what Linode's ratio is. But Linode has better mechanisms for limiting
heavy disk users than I do. (heavy in terms of performance rather than in
terms of space... limiting by space is trivial.) My understanding is that they
keep iop counters or similar, and first warn, then limit you if you use a lot
more iops than most people. I don't do this, and sometimes overall disk
performance suffers because of it. But I do plan to emulate Linode in that
regard at some point.

And, of course, my most noticeable deficiency is that I do manual
provisioning, and Linode has a nicely automated setup. but I'm (very slowly)
catching up.

Now, I'm about half the price, too, but you already knew that.

------
hrabago
Wow, the list of excuses to not attempt a startup is getting shorter and
shorter. Ideas? Check. (See HN the past few days) Page design? Check. (Web
page templates with free samples) Hosting costs? Check. Now Free for a year
with AWS without being tied to a specific language/framework.

------
nopal
This is very competitive with the free Azure services Microsoft is offering to
MSDN subscribers: <http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-
us/subscriptions/ee461076.aspx>

~~~
ericrad
[Disclaimer - I work on Windows Azure]

Microsoft also offers a free promotion to all new subscribers (click "view
details" link under "Buy Now" button):
<http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/offers/>

From the site:

Included each month at no charge:

* 25hrs small compute instance

* 500MB storage

* 10,000 storage transactions

* SQL Azure 1GB Web Edition database (3months only)

Any monthly usage in excess of the above amounts will be charged at the
standard rates. This introductory special will end on March 31, 2011 and all
usage will then be charged at the standard rates.

~~~
face
The difference is, Azure locks you into a closed platform.

~~~
jasonkester
If, by closed platform you mean Windows, how is that different from EC2, which
locks you into either the closed platform of Windows or the closed platform of
Linux?

Either way, it's a pretty big platform to be locked into. Kinda like saying
your new laptop locks you into a closed platform.

~~~
lsc
how is Linux a closed platform?

Is it as easy to move from Azure to a co-located windows box as it is to move
from ec2 to a co-located Linux box? (e.g. install the image on the new box and
replace the kernel?)

------
8ren
> Now a someone who's purely back-end can actually take software he's written,
> and just throw it on some EC2 instances and sell it directly to consumer
> internet companies. There's no need to take a job with these companies now
> and...there's no need to release your software.
> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1788558>

That was in cloud vs. opensource... but I hereby humbly propose _8ren's
amazingly wonderful Open Service concept_ :

The cloud is the future, not only for the backend, but also components within
it - including middleware. Theoretically, _arbitrary functionality_ can be a
service - literally, any "function" (in the math sense - or stateful). That
is, anything that was previously open source.

It might even get to the point where the economics make sense to use an "open
service" instead of hosting it yourself, analogous to conventional open
source. This would require hosting that is: (1) practically free; (2) very
high performance; (3) very high availability; (4) security/privacy mechanisms.
We may be closer than you'd think - eg. if EC2 hosted "Open Services" for
free, which would _naturally be faster for EC2 paid services_ , making those
paid services more attractive. Then the competition needs to match it...
Google might do it too (already does, within its app engine).

To qualify for this amazing free hosted Open Service? Be open source.

~~~
franck
You might be interested in Jeff Lindsay's Public Open Source Services idea :

[http://blogrium.wordpress.com/2009/10/29/public-open-
source-...](http://blogrium.wordpress.com/2009/10/29/public-open-source-
services/)

<http://poss.gliderlab.com/>

~~~
8ren
Thanks, I like his market payment model esp how demand modulates supply - but
I believe that just the fact of payment adds admin overhead/transaction costs,
and slows adoption - you might as well charge a little more and make it a
business.

I think my suggested payment model makes Open Services easier to adopt,
because it has no admin overhead. The API is there, you call it, done. It is
paid for by amazon/google, because it benefits their paying customers - who
indirectly pay for it. Note that they would be paying for its hosting anyway,
if they deployed that open source themselves.

\- There would be admin savings from having just one deployment (more
efficient for everyone).

\- And it would be just as fast, if deployed in the same cloud (theoretically
- I'm assuming a coarse-grained IPC world, where apps are built by assembling
services anyway, which is where we're headed. I'm thinking of it like static
method calls in Java, that so get JIT inlined/stitched into one big lump at
runtime, even though they are in separate modules (class files)).

\- Plus, these free Open Services act as an advertisement and enticement to
non-EC2 users (or free users) - and once you've started using EC2-hosted Open
Services, the easiest step up is of course to move to becoming a paid EC2
yourself. There's a bit of lock-in. So it is in Amazon's interest, too. So
it's economically a _little_ bit like advertiser-subsidized TV. And
technologically, it's like Google's many free API's (eg. map API), but the
case is more compelling for the supplier, because it costs the same to
provide, but more directly pulls in paying customers.

\- I agree there would sometimes be issues with how much processing power it
gets (Dos attacks, abuse in general), but this is a complex issue, and I think
you'd need to actually run it for a time to discover the real issues and
experiment with solutions. But the vast majority of open source projects are
not used by anybody - these aren't using any resources (apart from memory,
which is close to 0 cost), and so their cost is negligible.

\- once one hoster provides it, it gives them a competitive advantage, and
other hosters need to match it to stay in the game.

\- over time, with Moore's law, the hoster's cost of providing these Open
Service approaches zero.

I think it's inevitable for Open Services to begin and spread (or something
functionally similar).

------
d2viant
Interesting that it lists 30GB data transfer (15 in/out) as one of the items.
All inbound data transfer is currently free anyways for everyone. It's been
due to expire at regular intervals, but they keep extending this further
(presumably to compete with Azure). I wonder if this indicates they will
finally eliminate free inbound data transfer for customers...hopefully not.

~~~
cperciva
The free incoming is currently set to expire on November 1st, exactly when
this starts. I'd like to see the free incoming continue, but this timing looks
like a bad sign. :-(

------
apl
I'm not a web developer but somewhat curious, so please excuse this
potentially inane question: How much can I actually _do_ with one Micro
Instance? Is it comparable to, say, a VPS in terms of handling and
capabilities?

Or is it an entirely different animal?

~~~
bmelton
This is pretty comparable to a Linode 512 slice, but with a little more
memory. The configuration is VASTLY different however. EC2 instances are
basically writable CD images -- which is to say, whatever you 'imprint' it
with as the image is what it will be every time it's rebooted. You can store
/tmp and /dev/null content on the instance just fine, so long as you know they
won't be there when you reboot. You are free to take 'snapshots' of important
changes (like, I just deployed my new app, let's create a new image).

To supplement this, they're also offering Elastic Block, which is an on-
demand, resizable static partition. This is your long-term disk, but it's sold
seperately, and has different usage / pricing metrics.

Generally speaking, you allocate your storage, then build your EC2 image, then
create a mount, set up your application / server configuration / etc, then
take a snapshot. That snapshot is the image you'll boot in the future.

~~~
apl
Thanks.

Is it feasible at all to (ab-)use this free Micro instance as a real
development machine for running little experiments? Assuming I keep one
instance running at all times, without adding any new ones, it seems like I
could just ignore the fluid snapshot system and treat it like a bog-standard
VPS.

~~~
bmelton
So, the reliability may not be there for that. If an instance crashes, or
becomes unavailable, or is, at the whim of Amazon, turned off, you've
completely lost your settings.

You can still use them as a standard VPS, of course, if you just take a little
care and mount a static file system up front, then use that for all dynamic
content/database store/uploads/etc.

The only real difference is that your persistent file store is completely
separate from the instance, which threw me for a big loop when they were new,
but has become old hat since then.

I don't know what the reliability is nowadays, but there used to be (when it
was very new) complaints that the instances would crash or come offline
without notice, and that as with all things, it would happen at very
inconvenient times. With care, and forethought, it's preventable, of course;
but what happened then was people trying to do exactly what you suggest, only
to be thwarted by the unreliability of the system.

Of course, the beauty of it, if planned for, is that it doesn't NEED to be
reliable. If you use the Elastic Load Balancer, you can spool up pre-
configured instances at the drop of a hat that service demand, and if one
crashes, it's easy enough to replace with a brand new instance. The instances
can all share a persistent file store, they can all be dynamically registered
with the load balancer. They can all function on their own with relative
autonomy (which is how businesses like CloudKick make their money.)

If nothing else, I'd advise you take advantage of this deal and play around
with it. It's a neat little system, and their elastic IP addresses are
something of a thought exercise at the beginning, and nothing short of
brilliant after you've figured it out. You'll learn something, and that's
always worth something.

------
tlack
This is an absolutely brilliant move. Trying to figure out pricing estimates
often discourages me from launching more stuff on AWS. Knowing I can get a
feel for it, for free, is a real game changer. This gives my projects a strong
base to start with.

A few observations: \- I wonder if you could create a new account for each of
your projects (er.. startups) or if Amazon would frown on that. \- They seem
to be extremely generous with this offer, except for the Amazon S3 limits.
20,000 GETs? That's nothing for the kind of resources that S3 is best at
hosting.

~~~
msg
It does say you need a valid credit card, which should deter most people who
aren't out to ruin their credit rating. Maybe businesses can mint multiple CCs
without dinging their rating but it would be riskier for them...

~~~
tlack
Couldn't you use one of those rechargeable temporary credit cards? The ones
they use to grant people with bad credit a semblance of a normal life..

------
Trano
They need to clarify the terms, it is unclear if this minimum usage is free or
if they will cancel your account if you go over. These are both in their
agreement:

"You also will be charged AWS’s standard rates for any use that exceeds the
free usage amount provided under the Offer."

"You will become ineligible for the Offer if, ... (b) incur fees for use of
the service that exceeds the free usage amount provided under the Offer. ..."

------
Multiplayer
1995: The best deal I could find was $1500 a month for 1mbit, (I was spending
(in 1995 dollars)) $4500 for 3mbit, and I spent 5k or so building the server
for what would become planetquake.com

What is happening now in both available (and free!) cloud computing resources
and the entire lean startup mentality is so far beyond my comprehension I
don't even know how to compare the two startup worlds of 1995 and 2010.

Lordy!

------
gilaniali
Great, I just signed up for a new account yesterday. Are secondary accounts
not allowed?

------
dholowiski
Wow that's... Cool but not that great of a deal. You need to create a new
account, and you only get 30gb of bandwidth. If you exceed any of the limits
it all converts to paid services. Plus, it's only for a year. Good for
learning ec2, but I'll stick with heroku or google app engine for my freebies.

As an aside, I realize how crazy it is to say that a year lease on a vps for
free is not a great deal. This is an amazing, magical time for web
developers/programmers.

~~~
nopal
_If you exceed any of the limits it all converts to paid services._

That's not how I read: "You also will be charged AWS’s standard rates for any
use that exceeds the free usage amount provided under the Offer."

~~~
dholowiski
Maybe I mis-read it. I keep coming back to this line which seems to imply
otherwise: When your free usage expires or if your application use exceeds the
free usage tiers, you simply pay standard, pay-as-you-go service rates

~~~
Trano
It looks like the 2 different terms are contradictory. We may have to wait and
see if they clarify whether you just have to pay the extra fees or if you are
completely switched to a paid account if you go over.

~~~
dholowiski
Of course, it would make sense if you only paid for the 'extra' charges if you
went over. It would be kind of sneaky if they charged you for the whole thing
if you went over. I hope they do clarify this.

------
sp4rki
This is a great move that will hopefully have the side effect of VPS services
reevauting their current plans. Slicehost/Rackspace for starters should have
done so a long time ago. Linode is a slightly better option, but they are
still going to be under pressure to make a better deal now. A great move by
Amazon to help make the entrance into web based software easier. Sadly my
needs require around 17 instances so I'm out of luck :P

~~~
dotBen
No, I don't believe a $20/month base plan on Linode is a true barrier for
anyone seriously considering deploying a real app.

If you can't be sure that $20/month makes sense then you've wasted a lot of
time building an app. If you don't have the $20/month then surely anyone
capable of developing an app can work for a few hours on a project for someone
and make more than enough to cover a year's hosting.

If you just want a shell account to dick about with then Linode isn't for you
and I don't think it's unfair to suggest that us folks running businesses off
Linode instances don't want your eggdrops and IRC servers on there either.

~~~
sp4rki
Excuse me, but what exactly are you disagreeing with? I said three things:

1) This move by Amazon is good because it will probably force Rackspace,
Linode, et cetera to reevaluate their plans and make better offerings. This
doesn't only affect the $20 plan, it affects all the plans. Hell with my
requirements I'd be spending $1360 a month in Linode, in which case wouldn't
you like paying a Benjamin or two less if you where in a similar position?

2) Anyone that doesn't have any infrastructure in place yet would be a fool
not to take advantage of this promotion to help bootstrap their app. Hell if
it doesn't work out you saved the equivalent $360 the experiment would have
costed you in Linode.

3) That sadly I can't use this promotion because I already have an
infrastructure in place consisting of 17 instances and other Amazon services.

Where did I suggest anything about eggdrops and IRC servers? So are you
implying Linode is not for me because I need 17 servers? Did you even read the
comment before trying to refute something I haven't said?

------
Terretta
I'm not sure what the Elastic Load Balancer is for when it's only a single EC2
instance.

~~~
thasmin
I'm assuming it can load balance to paid EC2 instances also. Even if not, it
would let potential customers learn how to use it.

------
ez77
Somehow they should work it out so that a credit card is not required. Google
keeps spam under control by verifying real people through SMS.

~~~
semipermeable
I don't think the credit card is meant to reduce spam. It's meant to let them
seamlessly charge you for overage.

~~~
ez77
GAE manages to give you the option of not having overages at all.

------
ankimal
I wonder what this would do for the startup community. Free hosting for a year
means, all you really need is an idea.

~~~
paulitex
And the ability to turn that idea into an actual product, lest we forget.

~~~
ankimal
I was alluding to the initial dilemma of where to host, how to host etc. Ideas
without the implementations are just that, ideas.

------
alexknight
Interesting. Didn't expect that from Amazon. Nice gesture indeed.

------
quizbiz
So how do I deploy RoR onto AWS? </complete-sys-admin-novice>

~~~
icco
<http://tinyurl.com/2bc43be>

~~~
tsycho
That was awesome......it's an even better response than RTFM!

