AWS Free Tier can be used for anything you want to run in the cloud, such as launching new applications, testing existing applications in the cloud, or simply getting hands-on experience with AWS.
The AWS Free Tier is offered across 100-plus services and allows you to get hands-on experience with AWS services such as Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, and Amazon RDS. The AWS Free Tier provides three types of offers.
- Some services are free to a certain limit every month.
- Others are free up to 12 months,
- and some services are short-term free trials, typically 30 or 60 days.
Knowing the differences between these tiers will equip you with more decision-making power as you begin your Cloud journey and exploration of AWS services.
Important note: Free Tier is not always free. It depends on the compute/storage usage etc. If you try out any free tier service, you need to make sure to tear it down at the end of your experiment, otherwise it may cost you a pretty penny! Keep in mind, when your free tier usage limits expire, it will automatically charge you as pay-as-you-go service rates. So in a nutshell, free tier applies to certain participating AWS services up to a specific maximum amount of usage.
Who qualifies for AWS Free Tier?
AWS Free Tier is available to all types of customers–students, entrepreneurs, small businesses, and Fortune 500 companies are all welcome to sign up.
For instance, you could be a student learning about AWS Cloud fundamentals. Or, you could be a small business owner who plans to launch your business website. Or, you might even be a senior manager of a large organization evaluating a machine learning experiment.
Free Tier Use Cases
Student perspective: There may be a student looking to upskill in cloud computing and has just started learning about AWS. Here are some ways to combine Free Tier offers to meet this goal. They could use EC2 to deploy a Windows Server. They may also look at adopting S3 to host their images. And if they wanted to set up a serverless database, they could consider using RDS Aurora. Brilliant way to gain some hands-on experience 🙂
Business perspective: There are many small to medium business owners looks to try AWS first before they migrate or sign up for new services. Let’s say a business owner who wants to develop and host resilient and secure websites and apps. They may consider using AWS Amplify for frontend web and mobile development and to quickly and easily build full stack applications. They may also try out Amazon Lightsail, which automatically configures networking, access, and security environments, taking the guesswork out of launching your server. Likewise, they could also leverage Amazon Honeycode for building productivity applications quickly with no programming required, helping them to simplify how they work. A fantastic way to try out!
Enterprise Perspective: There may be a senior manager working for a large enterprise. This leader is thinking about using AWS machine learning to improve customer experiences and optimize business processes. They could consider adopting Amazon SageMaker to build, train, and deploy machine learning models with fully managed infrastructure. They could also consider using Amazon Polly to turn text into lifelike speech, allowing their teams to create applications that talk and build entirely new categories of speech-enabled products. Not only that, but they may also consider trying out Amazon Comprehend to derive and understand valuable insights from text within documents, product reviews, social media feeds, and more.
These are just a few examples for combining AWS Free Tier offerings to suit different cloud journeys and goals.
OK! Those are all good, but there are many AWS services out there. How would I know which ones are free? Well, AWS has a dedicated page where anyone can find the free tier services list and all the other details about them. Please go to https://aws.amazon.com/free or click here. Also, you can find free tier when you are provisioning a service through AWS Management Console.
Manage Free Tier Services and Best Practices
If you use any free tier service, you need to make sure to tear it down at the end of your usage/experiment. You should regularly check up on your active services and billing to avoid any nasty surprises. You can also use a service like AWS Cost Explorer, which is very useful when it comes to managing Free Tier services. AWS Cost Explorer has an easy-to-use interface that lets you visualize, understand, and manage your AWS costs and usage over time.
If you choose to move on from free tier to paid services, you should also check out the pricing models, savings plans etc.
Pro tip: For beginners, the region section in the top right corner of the AWS Console can be very confusing! There are some services, you can/ have to choose which region you would like to provision to. But there are others where you don't need to specify any region, availability zone etc. For example, if you launch a free EC2 instance on Europe (London) eu-west-2 it won't show up if you change the region. So in that case, you need to check EC2 Global View to see all your instances. Probably ok when you are experimenting with few but becomes very complex, very quickly when you have many instances to manage an in an active IAM role
Happy Learning 🙂
