Amazon will be giving a year's free usage on its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) cloud platform to developers starting from the month of November. A new usage tier consisting of Amazon Simple Storage Service (also known as S3), Amazon Elastic Block Store, Amazon Elastic Load Balancing and AWS data transfer will be created, reports eWeek. Standard rates will automatically apply at the end of one year.

Essentially, the usage tier will give developers 750 hours of micro-Linux Amazon EC2 instance usage with 5GB of Amazon S3 storage and 30GB of Internet transfer (15GB in, 15GB out) per month. This is sufficient for continuous operation for the year--a prelude to building the next great cloud project. It is clear how Amazon is working with an eye towards the mid-term and signing up new developers on its EC2 platform.

I don't doubt that Amazon is hoping for the success of new web projects or cloud-hosted applications that will spur even greater usage in the future. What's more, there appears to be no hidden catches or long-term commitments, leaving developers free to leave any time they want, a point Amazon appears keen to emphasize. All in all, this looks to be a good deal for new developers looking to move onto Amazon's EC2 platform.

For more on this story:
- check out this article at eWeek
- check out this article at Information Week

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