Top 10 must use Free-Tier Amazon Web Services | Getting Started
When I signed up for AWS, I didn’t actually explore what I am really getting under the 1-year free-tier period from AWS but what I found later was huge. It’s worth knowing that the most useful services required for any application are mostly covered under the free tier.
I have also used the Google Cloud Platform(GCP) in the past and anyone like me might think that growing but comparatively new in the industry, GCP would be cheaper or at least should come with more inside the initial trial period but its totally wrong. Using AWS there is no going back to Google (but there are other cheaper cloud options one might go to if money is a thing e.g. Vercel which is no comparison to cloud giants and indeed uses AWS/GCP services as backends but gives free hosting to a lot of applications under the hobby tier, not for commercial use). GCP has one advantage though that it has a better UX ;)
Ok, that’s enough of comparison, let's see the best of AWS:
1. EC2 Instance
Elastic Compute Cloud or EC2 is a Platform as a Service which can be used to deploy any of your traditional monolith applications (e.g. spring-boot, django, Wordpress, etc.) on the cloud with usually no code changes. The free-tier covers the following:-
- 750 hours/month x 12 (a little more than 31 days a month) of t2.micro Linux and Windows (t3.micro if t2 if not available in your region)
- t2.micro covers the following:
2. RDS
Relational Database Service or RDS is another PaaS but only limited to Database services. Amazon RDS supports traditional MySQL, postgres, SQLServer, MariaDB, and Oracle. The free-tier covers the following:-
- 750 hours/month x 12 db.t2.micro instance.
- db.t2.micro instance covers the following:
3. Cognito
Cognito comes with a simplified but secure Authentication API. Cloud is mostly about breaking monoliths into microservices and Authentication is one of the basic features that any app has. Unlike the above two services, Cognito comes with all-time-free 50,000 MAUs(monthly active users, a parameter in which amazon measures each registered and calculates monthly bills for cognito). It basically translates to AWS managing at least 50,000 users for free although SNS (discussed next) for sending verification messages is chargeable.
You can read more about it here https://aws.amazon.com/cognito/pricing/
4. SNS
Simple notification service or SNS lets you send SMS(worldwide), emails and Firebase notifications. Although, it is not largely free but a lot cheaper than any other you can find at least for small quantity IMO. Free-tier covers as follows:
5. Lambda Functions
Lambdas are serverless compute service that lets you just write code without thinking about the platform it may run on(off course you get to choose the programming environment though). And guess what? AWS gives 1 lac lambda invocations for free-always. Read more about pricing https://aws.amazon.com/lambda/pricing/
5. S3
Simple Storage Service or S3 can be used to store objects/files on the cloud and access them. S3 provides the API to handle your cloud filesystem called buckets with authentication, permission, etc. Free-tier has:
6. Certificate Manager(ACM)
If you have deployed a website before you must have encountered with Domain verified SSL. ACM lets manage your certificate (autorenewal, saving, serving SSL over the cloud, etc.), but can also issue (CA Amazon) certificates to be used for services over AWS for free though you can only get a Free-Amazon-issued SSL for AWS services if you have selected your region to N.Virginia (us-east-1). Note that it doesn’t give you the private key to download. If interested I have a whole article about how to deploy a static SSL website for free on AWS.
8. CloudFront
It is a content delivery network and helps you with caching and securing the communication between different microservices(if configured with CloudFront). But its also the most undervalued when someone looks into the free tier IMO. CloudFront free-tier includes 50GB data transfer out, 2,000,000 HTTP and HTTPS requests and that's huge! See more about it https://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/?did=ft_card&trk=ft_card
9. AppSync
AppSync Lets you deploy serverless scalable GraphQL APIs (authentication, hosting, etc. all includes) and the free tier covers the following:
10. DynamoDB
It's a NoSQL DBMS service offered by AWS which is a lot different than any of the traditional DBMS and that is the reason why AWS is offering all of it for a lifetime(if this is what they mean with always which I personally doubt) free:
Not to say but I have included all the URLs by AWS for pricings discussed here just at the end of each topic (either in the image ALT else attached in the text). Prices might change in the future so only trust the original sources.
