An amazing hot deal !  Beginning Nov 1 , Amazon will offer 1 year of free usage to its web services in cloud to all new customers. The free stuff includes

AWS Free Usage Tier (Per Month):

• 750 hours of Amazon EC2 Linux Micro Instance usage (613 MB of memory and 32-bit and 64-bit platform support) – enough hours to run continuously each month*
• 750 hours of an Elastic Load Balancer plus 15 GB data processing*
• 10 GB of Amazon 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

  **
  

In addition to these services, the AWS Management Console is available at no charge to help you build and manage your application on AWS.

This is really a good deal especially for developers who will want to try out Google and Amazon web services before making a decision.

Why has amazon doen so ?

Google is coming out with new features for it App service.  Recently Google announced partnership with Spring.

Amazon is trying to get some more customers with their freemium model.