Sunday, March 27, 2011

Free OS on the Cloud for one year

In case you didn't know already, Amazon is offering a free cloud hosted Linux VM for one year, when you sign up for their Cloud services. It's called a Micro Instance and comes with a load of freebies including:

  • 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 standard 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**
  • 10 Amazon Cloudwatch alarms**
(Source: From Amazon.com)

First you need to create a AWS (Amazon Web Services) account. This blog has a nice write-up on how to get started.

Microsoft on the other hand is offering Windows Azure Platform on Trial through June 2011. It also includes 3 months of SQLAzure.
  • Compute:
    • 750 hours of an Extra Small Compute Instance
    • 25 hours of a Small Compute Instance
  • Storage:
    • 500MB
    • 10k Storage transactions
  • Data Transfers:
    • 500MB in / 500MB out
  • Relational Database:
    • 1G Web Edition SQLAzure database (for 90 days only)
  • Access Control transactions:
    • 100k
  • Service Bus connections:
    • 2
You can get more details and sign-up by visiting here