On Thursday, Amazon Web Services announced their free cloud offering for developers and this news sent many in the cloud community dizzy. Whether AWS expected such a round of free marketing or not, the tech media gave them a round of applause for this move. As far as I am concerned, this fell in the yawn category and I feel that this is not enough even from a pure marketing gimmick point of view.
What is the offer?
AWS Free Tier gives the following cloud services to the developers at no cost
- A Micro Instance
- Elastic Load Balancer with 15 GB data processing
- 10 GB of Elastic Block Storage plus 1 million I/Os, 1 GB of snapshot storage, 10,000 snapshot Get Requests and 1,000 snapshot Put Requests
- 5 GB of Amazon S3 storage, 20,000 Get Requests, and 2,000 Put Requests
- 30 GB per of internet data transfer (15 GB of data transfer “in” and 15 GB of data transfer “out” across all services except Amazon CloudFront)
- 25 Amazon SimpleDB Machine Hours and 1 GB of Storage
- 100,000 Requests of Amazon Simple Queue Service
- 100,000 Requests, 100,000 HTTP notifications and 1,000 email notifications for Amazon Simple Notification Service
- Plus, the usual AWS management console
Ok, what are the caveats?
Two things
- Most of the free services are for new customers only. This is understandable in a way.
- Most of the free services are for one year only (except SimpleDB, SQS and SNS which are free forever)
That’s really good. What is your problem dude?
Well, this is not a new or novel idea as many in the tech media made it out to be. Joyent has been running similar program for the Facebook developers. Microsoft offers a similar program on Azure cloud which is free for 8 months (someone from Microsoft: please explain to me how you arrived at the number 8 ) and it is available under their Bizspark program. So, this is not a new or novel concept even among the cloud infrastructure providers. This is a time tested campaign to lure developers into their cloud and lock them in for sometime (till the developer one day wakes up to find that he can get similar service for cheap with another cloud provider).
If Amazon genuinely wanted to help the developers get started, they should instead offer this program free forever. Let me explain why this should be the case.
- First, Amazon can easily afford to give out a micro instance for free to a developer forever. This good will will help them get the developer to pay them as his/her needs shoot up. Amazon can easily recover the money as the developer starts to scale the app beyond the capabilities of a micro instance
- A developer cannot do much with a micro instance. Micro instance is only capable of hosting a small low throughput web app. It is quite likely that the developer will scale up/out of a micro instance fast
- Usually, the developers in the social space play around with their apps for more than a year before they decide to focus on one single app that will be part of their startup. Giving a free offer that doesn’t even last till they start exploring the business opportunities around their app is of no use to the developers. Instead, by standing with them during the early stages and gaining their goodwill, Amazon can easily tap them to stay with their platform
Conclusion
Even though it is a good offer from Amazon, it is not enough to convince today’s smart developers to bet their future on Amazon platform. When there are PaaS services like Google App Engine that offers some level of free services forever, Amazon one year free offer appears like the 30 day trial versions we had during the traditional software days. Developers in the current era are much smarter and they don’t easily fall for such traps. Overall, it is a missed opportunity for Amazon, especially when developers find PaaS more attractive than IaaS. What do you think?
Related articles
- Amazon Web Services Offers Free Cloud Access (avantrasara.com)
- Amazon announce free web services (edugeek.net)
- Try out Amazon EC2 (zdnet.com)
- Amazon offers free EC2 cloud instance for a year (v3.co.uk)
- Amazon Launching ‘Free Usage Tier’ For AWS [TNW United States] (thenextweb.com)
- Amazon Web Services offers EC2 access at no charge (infoworld.com)
- Amazon Web Services Unveils Free Service (readwriteweb.com)
Hi Krish,
I don’t understand why you feel the service offering has to be free or steeply discounted forever, or has to be radically different with some kind of tawdry shock and awe campaign to distinguish it anyone else’s offering? Amazon is providing a wide swath of a pretty comprehensive solution set either free or deeply discounted. Frankly I’m a little jealous since I’d love to use that tier for my personal development and experimenting, but I’m not eligible. I paid for my development usage.
It’s not Amazon’s responsibility to coddle a developer with no business plan, and no direction indefinitely with free use of their servers, storage and bandwidth until they come up with a viable plan to be able to pay to use the system. It’s a gift that they provide it at all, and with so many of their various services in the offering. It does provide a low risk way for a developer on a limited budget to get familiar with the various systems Amazon provides and develop for them without much obligation.
I don’t see how it locks anyone into anything since all the functionality can be reproduced elsewhere. I believe that the free developer period shouldn’t be used for development, but should really be used at the point the developer is looking to scale an application into a cloud environment. Any application itself that would run on EC2 is easily developed by the developer on any Linux box. It’s not until you start dealing with multiple instances, messaging services, non-MySQL databases and load balancers that Amazon brings value, and all of those are part of the offering. A year is ample time for a decide if the system is right for your needs, and properly designed code should be abstracted enough to not be relying directly on AWS’s API calls.
I would agree that the limitations of the micro-instance make it much less attractive than a regular EC2 option. It really only seems viable for experimentation, and I think that was the intent. There is nothing that I’m aware of precluding a developer from using the other instances for bandwidth or CPU intensive testing.
I would also suggest that any developer who flees the Amazon eco-system because it’s not free forever is not the kind of client that Amazon really wants. I would point to companies like Netflix with expansive budgets and the luxury of time who make smart decisions who place their bets on Amazon. A good customer appreciates the proven value of the infrastructure, the reliability, innovation (Does Azure offer linux? Joyent JUST launched a Windows offering) the scalability, sustainability, the diverse services (SNS, SQL and NoSQL databases, instance sizes) and the API and support of the stack by third party applications and management tools.
Let the crowd who chases the net free lunch who aren’t Amazon’s ideal client go elsewhere and tie up someone else’s resources. As a customer hosting some of my services on Amazon, I’d rather not see AWS turn into the Dreamhost of cloud hosting.
– David Bullock
Vice President of Technology
OneCoach
David,
If Amazon doesn’t want to coddle the developers at an early stage, they are the ones going to lose out. There are many PaaS services willing to give developers a long rope and if any infrastructure services player wants their business, they need to go beyond what Amazon is doing now. Yes, such small time developers are loose change for Amazon but it adds up. We need to see this in the context of PaaS as the future of cloud services and Amazon is in the infrastructure space.
I actually think this is a great offer on top of the fact that AWS services cost pennies already. I am surprised how many people complain about the fact that they can’t take advantage of the offer as they are existing customers. We are based in a developing country where the worth of $$ is higher than in the US and still we are ok paying our bills.
AWS is definitely cheaper but if they really want to tie up developers enmasse, this short term gimmick will not help much. I have spoken to many developers and they don’t easily fall for such attempts to lock them in. They need more value.
Hi Krish,
You keep mentioning lock in? What’s the lock in? There’s not a commitment to use the service unless you use reserved instances? The offer is just a low risk way for developers to get familiar with the environment. Could you address the points?
Where ARE the smart developers who require free cloud computing services going?
By the way thank you Andy, I’ve been a CloudBerry free user for some time, and just upgraded to Pro. LOVE your product.
– David Bullock
OneCoach
David, Lock-in is not just a contractual lock-in. If you have large amounts of data, try taking it out of Amazon Web Services. Calculate the time and costs involved. It will be prohibitive enough, in many cases, to be considered a lock-in. Not every provider makes it easy to take out data.
Can you take out a VM from Amazon EC2 and run elsewhere without much trouble? If your answer is no, there is another instance of lock-in.
Hi Krish,
Thanks much for the clarification, and response. Great points.
Data costs about 10 cents per gigabyte to download in small quantities. 10GB would cost a dollar. 100GB, $10.00. I typically see 600KB/sec download speeds. That’s assuming the dev data was generated in the cloud and that there’s no local copy, and is valuable, and needs to be saved or moved elsewhere.
So if you’re in a hurry, Amazon does provide solutions for moving huge amounts of data quickly with their Import/Export service. You can send them a SATA drive up to 8TB in size. An expedited 2TB export would be under $150.00.
No, you wouldn’t want to transfer the AMI VM. There’s no intrinsic value there: it’s just a standard Windows or Linux install with some kernel mods for the Xen virtualization environment. Just reinstall your software on your new target environment. The beauty of EC2 is that the reverse is true, you can do a lot of dev and test on in-house commodity Linux boxes, and just copy the code up to the cloud to run on EC2 when you’re ready to start working in that environment.
I hope savvy developers don’t keep their only copy of their source on their test EC2 instance. In any event, the worst case is just to tar and bzip2 it and download. Even a huge app (1GB of code) would cost under $2.00 to retrieve.
I suspect the real lock-in would be if the developer carelessly built dependencies into their code on the other Amazon specific services (SNS, SQS, SimpleDB, provisioning, map reduction, etc) without properly abstracting them so that they could be reimplemented easily elsewhere without a lot of rewriting.
Best,
– Dave
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I agree that allowing an infinate free usage-teir would be nice. However, since no-one else is doing it yet the suits of Amazon have no reason to be considerate of the developers they are trying to make money from.
Now, if a new cloud service shows up – they just might have to offer a ‘free-for-life’ setup to break in on amazons monopoly.
It’s all about doing the least to win. Companies don’t care about their users for the sake of caring.