Getting started with Amazon Cloud Infrastructure

Though slightly intimidated by all the (impressive) infrastructure and software-as-a-service (SAAS) offerings available from Amazon and other IT suppliers hosted on Amazon, I found the intros and documentation quite accessible. I was especially thrilled to discover Amazon's Free Usage Tier.


AWS Free Usage Tier (Per Month):
Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
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 Amazon EC2 Microsoft Windows Server‡ 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*
30 GB of Amazon Elastic Block Storage, plus 2 million I/Os and 1 GB of snapshot storage*
Simple Storage Service (S3)
5 GB of Amazon S3 standard storage, 20,000 Get Requests, and 2,000 Put Requests*
DynamoDB
100 MB of storage, 5 units of write capacity, and 10 units of read capacity for Amazon DynamoDB.**
Relational Database Service (RDS)
750 hours of Amazon RDS Single-AZ Micro DB Instances, for running MySQL, Oracle BYOL or SQL Server (running SQL Server Express Edition)‡‡ – enough hours to run a DB Instance continuously each month*
20 GB of database storage
10 million I/Os
20 GB of backup storage for your automated database backups and any user-initiated DB Snapshots
SimpleDB
25 Amazon SimpleDB Machine Hours and 1 GB of Storage**
Simple Workflow (SWF)
1,000 Amazon SWF workflow executions can be initiated for free. A total of 10,000 activity tasks, signals, timers and markers, and 30,000 workflow-days can also be used for free**
Simple Queue Service (SQS) and Simple Notification Service (SNS)

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**

more...

The Free Usage Tier was especially welcome after I tried the Simply Monthly Calculator with the reference web application topology selected. With the default load/configurations, the estimated monthly cost came up to the stunningly-out-of-my-budget amount of: $1,660 per month.

Even though this 3-tier web application is the topology I'm going for, I should be able to fit my web app (Weather Scout) into the Free Usage Tier offering (based on expected utillization being close to zero, no load loadbalancing, scaling group, or high availablity clusters).