The so-called AWS Free Tier also gives you free access to 18 different AWS products. This way you get a fuller experience, and can see which additional products make sense for your environment.
There are limitations. You must get an AWS account and provide credit card info. If you exceed the limits of the free tier, your card will be billed.
The Free Tier comes with Amazon EC2 with up to 750 hours each month of RHEl, SLESt2, or Linux Microsoft instances, and another 750 hours of Windows t2micro instance use.
On the storage side, you get 5 GB of standard Amazon S3 storage.
The recently announced AWS Lambda is also available. This tool can execute code when certain events occur, and can scale the cloud resources to accommodate the additional load.
Other tools include:
- AWS Key Management Service
- Amazon DynamoDB, a NoSQL database that comes with 25 GB of storage.
- Amazon CloudFront, a way of sending content to users with minimal latency.
- Amazon RDS, a database service.
Beyond the 18 Amazon products, Free Tier users can also try out over 700 third party tools from the AWS Marketplace. “If you qualify for the AWS Free Tier, you can use these products on an Amazon EC2 t2.micro instance for up to 750 hours per month and pay no additional charges for the Amazon EC2 instance (during the 12 months),” Amazon said. Some of these third party tools have fees attached.
There are certain restrictions. “These free tier offers are only available to new AWS customers, and are available for 12 months following your AWS sign-up date. When your 12 month free usage term expires or if your application use exceeds the tiers, you simply pay standard, pay-as-you-go service,” Amazon said.
