Free Cloud Computing Offers

Here are some free cloud computing offers I've stumbled upon so far. They could help a student or anybody interested with the topic to get started.

Amazon AWS Free Usage Tier

AWS Free Tier combines 750 hours of Amazon EC2 Linux Micro Instance, some storage (10GB of EBS and 5GB of S3), data transfer, queue operations and SimpleDB - enough to experiment with Amazon for a month. Valid credit card is still required (you will be charged for extra usage). Offer is mostly valid for new AWS accounts and will expire after 12 months.

Windows Azure Introductory Special

There is an offer from Windows Azure that provides you with free 25 hours of cloud computing and some storage per month. Valid credit card is required and you will be charged for anything extra. Not much, but might be enough to get some feel. Plus you can always use Development Fabric locally (keep in mind though, that Dev Fabric is a bit different from the real Azure Fabric).

Plus I found this Windows Azure platform 30 day pass. The site looks authentic, but is a bit confusing, though.

Heroku Free Offer

Heroku offers one dyno (web process) and a shared database for free. That's enough to get started with ruby cloud platform for a student.

Google App Engine

This cloud Computing platform supports Java and Python and is free to get started with. You can use up to 500 MB of storage and enough CPU and bandwidth to support an efficient app serving around 5 million page views a month. Read more.

Thanks to Harry for this tip.

Sign up for Moncai

.NET Folks can also sign up for Moncai beta - there might be a bit of free .NET Cloud Computing to experiment with this winter.

My Personal Choice

When I was starting to learn cloud computing, I simply signed up for the Amazon/Rackspace accounts and was using their services, while stopping all cloud machines at the end of each learning session. With prices starting from $0.015 per hour, total monthly payments were always below the cost of a cup of good coffee (even when I was running multiple cloud instances during the complex learning sessions).

What do you think? Are there any other introductory offers for cloud computing that I've missed? Please, comment and I will keep this page updated.

Thanks to roby for asking this question with regard to the conversation of 10 Steps To Become Better .NET Developer and related talk about using Open Source to Learn.

Comments

[roby]

Thanks for this exaustive reply

[Harry M]

Worth mentioning Google app engine I would have thought. Apprx. 5 million page view per month free.

[Rinat Abdullin]

Harry, thank you very much for filling in this gap!

I've updated the blog post.

[Rob]

Thanks for the list.
I wanted to add two more free services:
Force.com (cut and paste from their site):
Up to 100 users
1 free application
Up to 10 database objects
1GB of storage
Test customizations in a development sandbox
Complete cloud platform
Secure and reliable cloud infrastructure

Database.com:
It allows you to access a database through standards based APIs, like REST, SOAP, OAuth and SAML.
100,000 records
50,000 transactions per month
3 users