*If you haven't already tried cloud computing, this is your chance to use free for a year! -tom *
*http://aws.amazon.com/free/* *Amazon offers new customers free cloud computing for a year* By Carl Brooks 21 Oct 2010 | SearchCloudComputing.com Apparently deciding that a random Thursday afternoon was simply *not awesome* until it dropped a bombshell, cloud computing<http://searchcloudcomputing.techtarget.com/sDefinition/0,,sid201_gci1287881,00.html>leader Amazon said it will now give away a free year of Amazon Web Services (AWS) for new users. "Beginning Nov. 1, new AWS customers will be able to run a free Amazon EC2 Micro Instance <http://aws.amazon.com/free/> for a year, while also leveraging a new free usage tier for Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3)<http://searchcloudcomputing.techtarget.com/sDefinition/0,,sid201_gci1230589,00.html>, Elastic Block Store, Elastic Load Balancing and AWS data transfer," states Amazon Web Services' website. A Micro instance<http://searchcloudcomputing.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142,sid201_gci1519899,00.html>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. 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 *free*. 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.
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