Amazon Web Services: Cloud Computing Free of Charge

Howly shmoly, just read the announcement of Amazon’s Free Usage Tier offering an EC2 micro instance free of charge for a whole year! Sounds cool, doesn’t it? Well let’s go back a few months and analyze the reason why I left Amazon in favor of Media Temple’s (ve) service: Amazon is way too expensive for a young geek like me, barely having the money to pay rent for my lousy apartment in Moscow ;)

Well that’s not the only reason, but I’m now quite comfortable with (mt)’s services, except their tech support, but that’s not what this post is about. I must have flooded my Twitter with messages about Django and Python. Honestly, I fell in love with Python a few months ago (in theory) then started scratching code in the beginning of October, but then again, this is not what the post is about (can somebody tell me why I’m going off-topic today?)

Back to AWS. The news is good, but the fact that they mention “new customers” frightens me:

These free tiers are only available to new AWS customers and are available for 12 months following your AWS sign-up date. When your free usage expires or if your application use exceeds the free usage tiers, you simply pay standard, pay-as-you-go service rates (see each service page for full pricing details).

I’ve been with them for over a year, paying a bunch of money every month, so I’m not a new customer for them anymore, unfortunately. So they’re not really targeting old customers which were unsatisfied with something, but new ones which have never tried EC2 (S3 and all the rest). Again, this is only a trial, unlike Google AppEngine, which happens to love Python code.

So my thinking is – is this all a coincidence, or is it a light for me towards AppEngine, Python and Google? Stay tuned: @kovshenin :)