What happens when you really, really, focus on efficient infrastructure and driving down costs while delivering a highly available, high performance service? Well, it works.  Costs really do fall and the savings can be passed on to customers.

AWS prices have been falling for years but this is different.  Its now possible to offer an small EC2 instance for free. You can now have 750 hours of EC2 usage per month without charge.

The details:

·         750 hours of Amazon EC2 Linux Micro Instance usage (613 MB of memory and 32-bit and 64-bit platform support) – enough hours to run continuously each month*

·         750 hours of an Elastic Load Balancer plus 15 GB data processing*

·         10 GB of Amazon Elastic Block Storage, plus 1 million I/Os, 1 GB of snapshot storage, 10,000 snapshot Get Requests and 1,000 snapshot Put Requests*

·         5 GB of Amazon S3 storage, 20,000 Get Requests, and 2,000 Put Requests*

·         30 GB per of internet data transfer (15 GB of data transfer “in” and 15 GB of data transfer “out” across all services except Amazon CloudFront)*

·         25 Amazon SimpleDB Machine Hours and 1 GB of Storage**

·         100,000 Requests of Amazon Simple Queue Service**

·         100,000 Requests, 100,000 HTTP notifications and 1,000 email notifications for Amazon Simple Notification Service**

More information: http://aws.amazon.com/free/

                                      --jrh

James Hamilton

e: jrh@mvdirona.com

w: http://www.mvdirona.com

b: http://blog.mvdirona.com / http://perspectives.mvdirona.com