<div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_quote"><br><div dir="ltr"><font size="4"><i>If you haven't already tried cloud computing, this is your chance to use free for a year!<br>-tom<br></i></font><br><div class="gmail_quote">
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<p class="MsoNormal"><b><font size="4" face="Arial"><span style="font-size: 14pt; font-family: Arial; font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://aws.amazon.com/free/" target="_blank">http://aws.amazon.com/free/</a></span></font></b></p>
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<h1><b><font size="6" face="Times New Roman"><span style="font-size: 24pt;">Amazon
offers new customers free cloud computing for a year</span></font></b></h1>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><font size="3" face="Times New Roman"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">By Carl Brooks<br>
21 Oct 2010 | SearchCloudComputing.com <br>
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<p><font size="3" face="Times New Roman"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Apparently
deciding that a random Thursday afternoon was simply <i><span style="font-style: italic;">not awesome</span></i> until it dropped a bombshell, <a href="http://searchcloudcomputing.techtarget.com/sDefinition/0,,sid201_gci1287881,00.html" target="_blank">cloud
computing</a> leader Amazon said it will now give away a free year of Amazon
Web Services (AWS) for new users.</span></font></p>
<p><font size="3" face="Times New Roman"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">"Beginning
Nov. 1, new AWS customers will be able to <a href="http://aws.amazon.com/free/" target="_blank">run a free Amazon EC2 Micro Instance</a> for a year, while also
leveraging a new free usage tier for Amazon's <a href="http://searchcloudcomputing.techtarget.com/sDefinition/0,,sid201_gci1230589,00.html" target="_blank">Simple
Storage Service (S3)</a>, Elastic Block Store, Elastic Load Balancing and AWS
data transfer," states Amazon Web Services' website. A <a href="http://searchcloudcomputing.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142,sid201_gci1519899,00.html" target="_blank">Micro
instance</a> is a about half a CPU core and 613 MB of RAM, enough to
comfortably run the family website or chug away at a smallish database
application without insane Web-scale traffic. In fact, it's about what a pretty
high-end server was capable of 10 years ago; those were enough to get Yahoo and
Google going, so no scoffing from the power snobs.</span></font></p>
<p><font size="3" face="Times New Roman"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">There are
a few limits: only 10 GB of impermanent Elastic Block Storage, 5 GB of
permanent S3, and a maximum of 30 GB of traffic in and out. But, uh, it's <b><span style="font-weight: bold;">free</span></b>. Free, free, free. Why? Who knows.
Let's just say that anyone who has guessed what AWS' operating margins are (the
difference between what it costs AWS to run an instance and what AWS charges
for that instance) should let those guesses go, because apparently the answer
is infinity. It costs so little to run AWS instances that they are just going
to give them away like a never-ending supply of cheese and cracker samples at
Costco.</span></font></p>
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