Getting Started with Free AWS Offerings

While businesses have been adopting the cloud and cloud services at an ever-increasing rate, not everybody has made the move to the cloud. There are still businesses that are evaluating the different cloud providers and their offerings. There’s no doubt that if you’re looking at cloud technologies then Amazon AWS will be front and center. Amazon AWS is today’s leading cloud provider and they have been providing cloud services to businesses longer than any of the other major cloud providers.

If you haven’t made the move to the cloud yet and you want to learn more about Amazon AWS, the AWS Free Tier can give you hands-on experience with the leading cloud provider at no cost.

AWS Free Tier

Amazon’s free tier provides access to a substantial number of free services that you can immediately put to use to experience the AWS platform. Some of the services that the AWS Free Tier provides include:

• Storage – Amazon Glacier provides 10 GB of long-term secure storage
• Hybrid Storage – AWS Storage Gateway provides 100 GB of hybrid cloud storage
• Database – Amazon DynamoDB provides 25 GB of NoSQL database storage with 25 Read Capacity Units and 25 Write Capacity Units
• Database migration – 750 hours of the AWS Database Migration Service
• Compute – AWS Lambda provides 1 M requests per month. Check out our guide explaining how to create an AWS Lambda function.
• Communications – Unlimited access to the Amazon Chime service that offers audio and video meetings
• Email – Amazon SES provides 62,000 outbound and 1,000 inbound emails per month
• Mobile messaging – Amazon SNS provides a push-based mobile messaging service with 1 M publishes and 1,000 emails per month
• Mobile identity – Amazon Cognito provides mobile user authentication
• Application Integration – AWS Step Functions coordinate distributed apps with 4,000 state transitions per month
• Application Integration – Amazon SWF provides task coordination for up to 10,000 tasks
• Application message queue – Amazon SQS provides 1 M queued messages
• Developer Tools – AWS X-Ray can provide 100,000 traces per month
• Developer Tools – 100 minutes of AWS CodeBuild which is a managed service that builds and tests code
• Developer Tools – 5 users per month of AWS CodeCommit which is a managed source control system
• Developer Tools – 1 AWS CodePipeline per month which provides continuous delivery for application updates
• Security – Amazon Macie provides 1 GB of data for discovery and classification
• Security – 20,000 encryption requests per month of the AWS Key Management Service
• Analytics – Support for 1 M ETL objects in the AWS Glue Data Catalog
• Monitoring – Amazon CloudWatch provides 10 custom metrics for monitoring cloud resources and applications
• Management – AWS License Manager reports third-party license usage
• Architecture – The AWS Well-Architected Tool reviews your cloud architecture using Amazon’s best practices

In addition to these always free services the AWS free tier also provides free trials of several other Amazon services. Many of the trials last as long as 12 months. You can sign up for the free AWS offering at AWS Free Tier. The sign-up process first requires an account name and password. Then you need to supply a credit card in case you use more AWS cloud resources than the free tier provides. Finally, you need to verify your identity using a phone text message. After that, you’re ready to explore the AWS portal and get started with AWS cloud storage and services.