Get a piece of cloud for free (AWS).
By: Bogdan Samoletskyi
Tags: AWS, Aws Free Tier, AWS Lambda

AWS free services overview.

Photo by Rukma Pratista on Unsplash

Disclaimer.

This is a brief overview of AWS free tier services.

Which types of free tier offers exists?

There’s a three main types of free tier offers (more on the official page):

Always free — never expires.

— never expires. 12 months free — obviously, you will have to pay after a year of usage.

— obviously, you will have to pay after a year of usage. Trials — short term offers.

And there’s a lot offers (around hundred)! Let’s narrow down our search a little.

What you will have always free as a developer?

My personal interest here — always free category. What can I have as a developer for possible pet-project and not to bother about payment?

Brief filtering shows you about forty offers in all categories. Not all of them interesting for me.

What is interesting here for me?

As a developer, which working on a small pet-project I will need something where I can run my code and store the results. Front-end also can be good, but, for the beginning some simple WebAPI should be enough. The same is true for the data scientist, who want to collect, and analyze data.

For developers and data scientists:

After filtering it in Compute and Database I see three offers:

Amazon DynamoDB — 25Gb of NoSQL storage. ”Enough to handle up to 200M requests per month.” as it describes. Not bad for small WebScraper or database for personal blog.

— 25Gb of NoSQL storage. ”Enough to handle up to 200M requests per month.” as it describes. Not bad for small WebScraper or database for personal blog. AWS Lambda — 1 Million free requests per month. I think it’s very generous, it should be more than enough for small project , or even few of them.

— 1 Million free requests per month. I think it’s very generous, it should be more than enough for small project , or even few of them. AWS Database Migration Service — 750 Hours, including 50GB SSD storage. If you already have database it can be a good way to go. However, they’re not mention about period of usage, so, I suspect you will have to pay after 750 hours will come to the end. On the other hand, if the project is small, it can lasts for years.

— 750 Hours, including 50GB SSD storage. If you already have database it can be a good way to go. However, they’re not mention about period of usage, so, I suspect you will have to pay after 750 hours will come to the end. On the other hand, if the project is small, it can lasts for years. AWS Step Function — 4000 state transitions per month. I put it here because it can be a good solution for lambda orchestration. 4000 should be enough for simple workflow.

For debugging and logging there’s also a few offers:

Amazon CloudWatch — 10 free metrics and alarms. Should be enough for basic health checks.

— 10 free metrics and alarms. Should be enough for basic health checks. AWS X-Ray — 100,000 traces per month. Very useful tool for debugging lambda functions. The number is also very generous for small projects.

For CI/CD you also has something, that you personally, or small team of developers can use:

AWS CodeCommit — up to 5 active users per month. You can develop your application in a small team for free.

— up to 5 active users per month. You can develop your application in a small team for free. AWS CodeBuild — 100 build minutes per month. Enough for not very often builds.

— 100 build minutes per month. Enough for not very often builds. AWS Pipeline — 1 active pipeline. For one project you can organize continuous delivery for free. If you have more project and willing to use this tool — you will have to pay.

For machine learning.

Unfortunately, when you chose this filter with “always free” option it remains empty. However, for other free options they have a bunch of services, which can be enough for some labor. So it can be useful if you need to train something for one time and don’t want to pay anything for it.

Final thoughts.

Amazon has a few interesting services, which is always free. Especially for serverless applications. Serverless backend can be used for some chat bots, web scraping, or as an API for Web site, maybe it can be used along with some free offers for static sites and couple it as JAM stack.

I will continue to investigate how to use AWS free tier in practice.