Amazon Web Services offers a wide range of services for building web applications, storing and managing data, managing customer engagement and a whole host of other computing capabilities in the cloud.
A large number of AWS services are available for free or free for 12 months so you can get familiar with them and build something worthwhile. These services are generally on the lower end of the compute scale or limited by the number of transactions.
Other higher value AWS services can be accessed for a shorter free trial period for you to see if they will do the job for you or perform to your expectations.
AWS Always Free Services.
The always free tier consists of services that do not expire and are always free to all AWS customers. The always free services at time of writing are:
Dynamo DB 25GB - Fast NoSQL database with 25 provisioned read/write units capable of processing 200 million requests per month.
AWS Lambda - Compute service that runs code in response to events. The free tier provides 1 million requests per month.
Amazon SNS - Push messaging service that will process 1 million publishes, 100,000 Https deliveries and 1000 emails per month for free.
Amazon Cloudwatch - Resource and Application monitoring service will allow you to establish 10 custom metrics and 10 alarms on the always free tier.
Amazon Cloudfront - Amazon's content distribution network will process 1TB of data transfer and 10 million http(s) requests per month
Amazon Cognito - Amazons SSO, sign up and access control service allows up to 50,000 monthly active users on the free tier.
Amazon Macie - This sensitive data detection and classification service will process 1GB of sensitive data classification via it's content classification engine.
Amazon SES - The Simple Email Service will process 62,000 outbound email messages per month when called through an EC2 instance or Elastic Beanstalk.
Amazon SQS - Amazons message queuing service will process 1 million message requests on the always free tier.
Amazon SWF - Simple Workflow Service will run 10,000 activity tasks or 30,000 workflow days scheduling application work across distributed components.
AWS CodeBuild - You can run 100 minutes of Codebuild which is a fully managed services that builds and tests code in the cloud.
AWS CodeCommit - You and four other users can use CodeCommit to manage source code and versioning on the free tier.
AWS CodePipeline - You can run 1 active CI/CD pipeline on the always free tier.
AWS Database Migration Service - You can run up to 750 hours of database migration in a single availability zone using a dms.t2.micro instance.
AWS Glue - You can store up to 1 million objects in the glue data catalog for free.
AWS Key Management Service - You can make 20,000 requests to the key management service for free each month.
AWS Licence Manager - You can make unlimited rules to interact with third party licences.
AWS Step Functions - Co-ordinates components of distributed applications. You can make 4000 state transitions per month on the always free tier.
AWS Storage Gateway - The first 100GB of this hybrid storage and transfer service is always free.
AWS Well-Architected Tool - You have unlimited workload reviews to ensure your architecture is in line with AWS best practice.
AWS X-Ray - You can run 100,000 traces per month to analyze and debug applications.
AWS Security Hub - Automate security checks and centralize alerts. On the always free tier you can get 10,000 ingested findings per region per month however in the first 30 days use of the security hub is free.
AWS Code Artifact - You can store 2GB of software artifacts and make 100,000 requests per month for free.
Amazon Honeycode - The Basic level of honeycode the no code web/mobile application builder is free and includes 20 users, unlimited workbooks and 2500 rows per workbook.
AWS Migration Hub - You can use migration hub to centrally managed application migrations for free.
AWS Application Discovery Service - You can track server info, performance details and information on running processes for up to 1000 applications per account.
AWS Service Catalog - You can make 1000 API calls to manage deployment of pre-approved applications and resources for your AWS users.
AWS Server Migration Service - Migrate an unlimited number of servers to AWS from Azure or on prem servers.
AWS CloudTrail - You can set up 1 trail for free to monitor account activity.
AWS Systems Manager - Free Systems Manager Features - Explorer, Resource Groups, Insights Dashboard, Inventory, Run Command, Session Manager, Patch Manager, Maintenace Window, State Manager, Parameter Store, On-Premises Instance Management, Distributor.
AWS CloudFormation - You can run 1000 handler operations to deploy infrastructure using code.
AWS Control Tower - You can use control tower set up and manage secure multi-account AWS environments.
AWS Organizations - You can use organizations for free to centrally manage billing, users, security and share resources across AWS accounts.
AWS Migration Evaluator - Is free to use to work out what your on premise network will cost to run on AWS.
AWS Data Exchange - There are over 1600 data sets available for free on AWS Data Exchange. They are delivered via API, files or redshift tables.
Amazon Chime - The basic level of Chime is free, delivering high quality audio and video meetings.
AWS Free for 12 Months
These services are available for 12 months for free to enable you to evaluate the services and resources. The free services are more limited than paid services but do provide a usable resource to allow you to get to grips with the services before you need to pay.
Amazon EC2 - Amazon's premiere compute virtual machines are available on the free tier. You can get 750 Hours per month using the t2.micro or t3.micro instances running linux or windows.
Amazon S3 - You can get 5GB of S3 storage buckets with 20,000 get requests or 2000 put requests.
Amazon RDS - The 12 month free tier gets you access to 750 hours per month of relational database for MySQL, PostgreSQL, MariaDB or SQL Server.
Amazon OpenSearch - (Formerly Elastic Search) You get 750 Hours of a t2.small.search or t3.small.search instances for web search, log analytics etc.
Amazon API Gateway - 1 Million API calls per month to APIs you create and manage with the service.
Amazon Comprehend - 50,000 units of text can be processed per API by this fully managed natural language processor.
Amazon Connect - You get 90 minutes per month of this cloud based contact centre service.
Amazon EFS - The 12 month free tier gets you 5GB of elastic file system for use by your EC2 instances.
Amazon EBS - 30GB of low latency block level storage for EC2 can be yours for free on the 12 month free tier.
Amazon Elastic Container Registry - You can store and retrieve 500MB of docker images per month for free for 12 months.
Amazon Elastic Transcoder - You can transcode 20 minutes of Audio on this free tier.
Amazon Elasticache - You can get 750 Hours of in-memory cache using cache.t2.micro or cache.t3.micro nodes.
Amazon Gamelift - 125 hours of on-demand instances for dedicated game server hosting
Amazon Lex - Get 10,000 text requests per month on the Lex voice and text chatbot service.
Amazon MQ - 750 Hours of open source message broking using a single instance mq.t2.micro or mq.t3.micro
Amazon Pinpoint - send 5000 targeted push notifications to your mobile apps.
Amazon Polly - You can process 5 million characters through the Polly text to speech service.
Amazon Rekognition - Process 5000 images per month through the image recognition service.
Amazon Transcribe - convert 60 minutes of speech to text per month on the 12 months for free tier.
Amazon Translate - translate 2 million characters using this neural machine translation service.
AWS Amplify Console - Get 1000 build minutes, 5GB storage and 15GB served with this modern web app build and deploy service.
AWS Data Pipeline - Get 3 Data pipelines for this data-driven workflow orchestration service.
AWS IoT Greengrass - Connect 3 devices for free to greengrass.
AWS IoT Core - process 500,000 messages through the IoT core
AWS OpsWorks for Chef Automate - Connect 10 nodes (7500 hours) for configuring Chef server and Chef Automate.
AWS OpsWorks for Puppet - Connect 10 nodes (7500 hours) to puppet enterprise.
AWS Elastic Load Balancing - Get 750 Hours of ELB goodness to spread the load over your EC2 instances.
Amazon Augmented AI - Set up 500 objects for free for 12 months in this human reviewed ML predictor.
Amazon Interactive Video - Set up 100 hours of interactive SD video per month.
AWS AppSync - Process 250,000 GraphQL queries or data modifications per month.
AWS Free Trials.
There are many services available on a range of limited free trial periods ranging from a few hours to a few months.
AWS 1 Hour Free Trials
Amazon Braket - Get your Quantum on for an hour with 1 hour free access to different types of quantum computing hardware.
AWS 40 Hour Free Trials
Amazon AppStream - Stream 40 hours of desktop apps to a browser.
AWS 15 Day Free Trials
Amazon Inspector - unlimited free trial to scan workloads for vulnerabilities.
AWS 30 Day Free Trials
Amazon QuickSight - Use this business analytics service for 30 days.
Amazon GuardDuty - 30 days of threat detection.
Amazon Chime - Upgrade to Chime Pro for free for 30 days.
Amazon Security Hub - Try security hub for free for 30 days.
Amazon Detective - Analyze security data for free for 30 days.
Amazon Kendra - Perform 750 hours of intelligent search for 30 days.
Amazon Lookout for Metrics - analyse 100 metrics for free in the first 30 days.
Amazon Certificate Manager - Run a CA and deploy public and private SSL/TLS certificates. (you still pay for the certs you issue)
AWS Secrets Manager - rotate, manage and retrieve secrets through their lifecycle for 30 days
AWS DocumentDB - use t3.medium instances for MongoDB for 30 days.
AWS 2 Month Free Trials
Amazon SageMaker Machine Learning - various transaction limits apply.
Amazon SageMaker Ground Truth - Build up to 500 training datasets.
Amazon Redshift - Data warehousing 750 hours DC2.large node.
Amazon Personalize - Build in personalized recommendations into your applications for 2 months for free.
Amazon Forecast - ML forecast service.
Amazon Fraud Detector - Pick up suspicious activity for 2 months for free.
Amazon MemoryDB for Redis - Use 750 hours of this in-memory database service per month for 2 months.
AWS 90 Day Free Trials
Amazon CloudEndure - Replicate source machines into staging for 90 days.
AWS 3 Month Free Trials
Amazon Lightsail - use 750 hours per month for 3 months.
Amazon Location Services - add location data to applications with up to 500k map tiles for 3 months.
AWS DevOps Guru - use the Guru for 7200 hours per month for 3 months.
AWS 6 Month Free Trials
Amazon ECS Anywhere - run ECS containers on customer managed infrastructure for 2200 hours per month for up to 6 months for free.
Amazon Resilience Hub - Try the hub for free for 6 months.
Usage Based Free Trials.
AWS Device Farm - Get 1000 device minutes to test your mobile apps on real devices in the cloud.
AWS RoboMaker - Get 25 SU-Hours to build and test robotic applications.
AWS Textract - Process 1000 pages through textract per month for free.
AWS Audit Manager - perform 35,000 resource assessments per month for 2 months.
So that's a run down of the free tiers currently available from AWS at time of writing (March 22) so you can deploy and play with resources and services without incurring charges while you learn.
Once you have deployed and built some AWS infrastructure, you can connect your AWS account to Hava and visualize the running infrastructure in diagram form. No manual drag and drop required. Hava automatically generates infrastructure diagrams, security diagrams, container diagrams and AWS compliance reports.
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