Free Cloud Compute for Software Development Experiments
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:
- 750 hours/mo of Azure compute
- 10 GB/mo of Azure storage
- 1,000,000 transactions/mo
- 5 service bus connections to AppFabric
- 1,000,000 access control transactions to AppFabric
- 3 1GB instances of SQL Azure database
- 21 GB of transfer (Europe and NA - 7 GB in/14 GB out) (APAC - 2.5 GB in/5 GB out)
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:
- 25 hours/mo of Azure compute
- 500 MB/mo of Azure storage
- 10,000 transactions/mo
- 2 service bus connections to AppFabric
- 100,000 access control transactions to AppFabric
- 1 1GB instances of SQL Azure database (for 3 months only)
- 1 GB of transfer (500 MB in/500 MB out)
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:
- 750 hours/mo of micro Linux EC2 (i.e. 31days * 24hrs = 744 hours or free use)
- 750 hours/mo of micro ELB
- 10 GB/mo of EBS
- 5 GB/mo of S3 storage
- 30 GB/mo of transfer (15 GB in / 15 GB out)
- 25 hours of SimpleDB
- 100,000 requests/mo on Simple Queue Service
- 100,000 notifications over HTTP and 1,000 over email for Simple Notification Service
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
