Amazon opens up Free Usage Tier to Windows Server developers

Amazon Web Services has announced that its Free Usage Tier will now include Amazon EC2 instances running Microsoft Windows Server.

EC2 allows users to deploy applications through Amazon's web service, where each instance (or virtual machine) is created, issued or terminated, as and when it is needed. Users only pay for what they use.

Amazon's Free Usage Tier allows new EC2 customers to trial its public cloud. Companies and developers have up to 750 free hours a month to launch new applications and test existing applications.

Prior to this announcement Amazon offered only Linux servers on its Free Usage Tier.

Amazon's move to include Windows as part of its free offering is an indication of its ongoing competition with the Azure Cloud – Microsoft's public cloud offering.

Laurent Lachal, analyst for Ovum, argued that Amazon's decision will help it draw more developers to its service.

"Free Tier is an offering that Amazon introduced in November 2010 to try to attract new people to its service. It wasn't the first free offering out there – Google and Microsoft had introduced similar products – and at the time Amazon's wasn't the most generous," said Lachal.

"This wasn't just in terms of the amount of hours that were on offer, but also the breadth of service in terms of data storage and I/O requests," he added.

"Amazon is the incumbent so it can afford to take its time in expanding the footprint of this free tier, but it does need to remain competitive. This keeps Amazon in competition with Microsoft's Azure cloud when attracting developers.

"It's an ongoing competition between Microsoft and Amazon, and Amazon is doing incremental things to remain in the race."