AWS Free Usage Tier now Includes Microsoft Windows on EC2 | Hacker News Reader

AWS Free Usage Tier now Includes Microsoft Windows on EC2

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99 pointsjeffbarr35 comments

Another option for devs seeking free .NET on AWS is AppHarbor (https://appharbor.com/) (YC W11) which has a free plan and also provides great deployment, build, add-on etc support.

I'm always a bit irritated when I see that companies provide new customers dreamy offers but the old customers get nothing (and are effectively subsidizing that).

If you already qualified for the free tier, you will still be able to have access to it, so it is not only for new customers but also for existing customers that qualified

The free tier is only for new customers. If you've been using AWS for years, you will not get this offer to test a Windows-server in the cloud.

If you already qualified for the free tier, meaning that you are already enjoying it because you signed within the last year, then it still applies to you. So it also applies to existing customers (who qualify for the free tier)

I think what fierarul means is that old customers, who have been using AWS for years, don't qualify for free tier while their money is being used to pay for it.

I am not sure it makes me happy either.

I know what fierarul means, he is the one that did not understand my comment. As an aside, I find it kind of funny that people would feel "irritated" by a move like this. The end goal of this for Amazon is to eventually get more customers in the paying tiers, which in turn will lead to them lowering their costs and passing those savings to all users (like they have been doing consistently). I, for one, think it is a great way of promoting EC2 and an alternative to, say, spending that money on Google ads.

I completely understand why Amazon is doing it and it's certainly their cloud to promote as they see fit. In fact, I am not sure why Microsoft doesn't do that with Azure.

In any case, I am a bit sad I no longer apply to the free tier.

Azure does have a free 3 month trial. http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/pricing/free-trial/

Well, I am just being irritated a bit, it's not like I'm making plans to leave AWS.

It's the same feeling you have when you see your mobile provider has great offers, as long as you are a first time buyer or if you are switching providers. But existing users... not so much.

I know what the end goal is for Amazon, but in the mean time I've just paid last month about $250 to reserve an instance for an year while new users get two micro instances for free.

Last time I was at an AWS event they encouraged existing customers to create a new account to use the free tier.

This is especially fun when renting. After some negative experiences, I actually avoid complexes that offer too good of a sweetheart deal to new tenants because having to move out after a year because rent effectively went up 15-20% is no fun (even if all you have to do is move in the unit down the hall).

It's the same thing as cable and whatever else. I'm feel like I'm constantly canceling services and restarting them to get the better deals (when the threat to do so isn't good enough). If you're willing to go through the hassle of creating new amazon accounts, or whatever it may be, to get the perk, the others are subsidizing you.

Along with 750 instance hours of Windows Server 2008 R2 per month, the Free Usage Tier also provides another 750 instance hours to run Linux (also on a t1.micro)

Does that mean you can run two t1.micro servers concurrently?

Edit: yes it does - http://aws.amazon.com/free

Only one instance is free, and only for the evaluation period (1 year I think). You can buy more / bigger instances and do as you please though.

Does anything stops me from creating new Amazon account after one year and copying all data to new free instance?

Remember that you need to provide credit card information, and they're pretty smart to check that "you already have an account".

Ethics aside, I've had no issue when creating an alternate account with the same CC info.

I only see this offer in english. Is it just not yet translated, or not available for germany?

It is available for all customers, just not yet translated

last time i tried windows in micro instances it wasn't usable. just to download and install all windows updates on the first boot took something like 6 hours due to the heavy cpu throttling (something that took a couple of minutes on a small instance). but maybe it's fixed now?

The way to do this is start the image as a small or large instance, apply all patches, install SW, then restart it as a Micro. When you need to install something again, restart the server as a larger instance type first. It's a pain.

The Micro instance is actually very fast for 5-10 seconds of CPU time, but is artificially throttled to very slow (like <5% CPU) after you use a few seconds of CPU.

I'm curious how people use Micro Instances in production, b/c you have to manage the CPU time very carefully, and the machine becomes unusable if you exceed it.

I've been able to use it as an interactive windows or linux shell in the cloud, but not much else.

Although they've increased free tier EBS limit to 30 GB, all windows images have root images of exactly 30 GB. So if you're planning (like me) to use both windows and linux instances in free tier you have to either install windows from installation media snapshot (on a EBS volume which is smaller than 30 GB) or pay for overage on EBS storage ...

At $0.10 / Gb, it is cheaper to pay the extra storage than go through the trouble of installing from scratch

You're probably right, but this is kind of fine print that isn't really visible (especially to new users) so it is important to put it in plain sight...

This is great news for .NET devs. Any good tutorials on setting up an ASP.NET MVC application to run on a free micro-instance?

Will this do?

https://aws.amazon.com/articles/3592?_encoding=UTF8&jive...

Wonder if the FreeBSD 9 AMI on a "windows" t1.micro is also free tier? http://www.daemonology.net/freebsd-on-ec2/

It should qualify, yes.

I wonder if MSFT is subsidizing the cost? Either way it seems that market economics has now dictated that server operating systems are free as in beer.

I doubt MSFT would subsidize the cost, they are competing with Azure.

Think about how they make money from Android while competiting with Windows Phone. They're clever enough to realise you can make money from multiple angles.

I'd imagine they'd prioritize lowering the barrier of creating .net webapps over Azure success. Azure is just one service but .net success is key part of their strategy.

You can get a free 3-month trial of Azure:

http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/pricing/free-trial/

if you get into the bizspark program you can get a much larger endowment from MS

http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/pricing/member-offers/

If they are, I'd see it the same way as funding the node port. The less temptations for developers to build on *nix, the better for Microsoft. Using Windows on EC2 means they're still using Windows, after all.

I just created a MS free tier instance and found it was using Windows Datacenter edition. If I recall, with DC edition, if you buy a DC edition licence for a physical server and run only Hyper-V hypervisor role on it, you can have unlimited number of virtual servers on it for free. I'ts possible Amazon is using this licencing clause to their advantage.

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