There has been good news for developers this year on the cloud computing front. There are freely available compute clouds offering a fairly robust environment, although I would caution enterprise software developers to not use corporate assets (e.g. code and data) when trying them out. This is especially true for systems that have to provide compliance to standards like PCI. Those private enterprise systems would be better off leveraging a service like HP's Cloud Start. For developers that just want to get their feet wet, here is a list of free environments:
Microsoft has allowed MSDN Subscribers to leverage Windows Azure platform for free.1,2 Those details are as follows:
For those that don’t have an MSDN subscription, Microsoft announced a free trial offer earlier this year as well that is good until June 30, 2011.1 Those details are as follows:
Starting November 1, 2010, new Amazon customers will be able to take advantage of a free EC2 instance for one year.1 In addition they will be able to leverage free usage tiers of S3, Elastic Block Storage, Elastic Load Balancing and AWS data transfer. So the free details are as follows:
1 - credit card must be used to sign up and charges will be incurred if the free limits are exceeded
2 - must have an existing Premium, Ultimate or BizSpark MSDN subscription
