As a developer, you’re a pretty important resources for service providers. Without developers, service providers cannot make savings based on scale. Having developers also means higher chances of someone having a killer idea on top of your service, creating even more value. And developers attract more developers.
In order to achieve that, service providers offer free services. In the Cloud realm, both Google and Amazon have a packaged offer valid for a year. Once the grace period has expired though, access to some limited free services is still available. This post tries to compare free services of those providers side-by-side.
Common offerings
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 |
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|---|---|---|---|
NoSQL database |
Product |
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Description |
Fast and flexible NoSQL database with seamless scalability |
Highly-scalable NoSQL database |
|
Storage capacity |
25GB |
1GB |
|
# of reads |
25 units |
50k |
|
# of writes |
25 units |
20k |
|
# of deletes |
20k |
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Analytics |
Product |
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Description |
Fast, secure mobile app usage analytics |
Fully managed, petabyte scale, analytics data warehouse |
|
# of events |
100 million |
||
# of queries |
1 TB |
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SCM |
Product |
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Description |
Highly scalable, managed source control service |
Multiple private Git repositories hosted on Google Cloud Platform |
|
Storage capacity |
50 GB |
1 GB |
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# of active users |
5 |
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# of requests |
10k |
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Serverless |
Product |
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Description |
Compute service that runs your code in response to events and automatically manages the compute resources |
A serverless environment to build and connect cloud services with code |
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# of requests |
1 million |
2 millions (including HTTP & method invocation) |
|
Compute time |
3.2 million seconds |
400k GB.seconds, 200k GHz.seconds |
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Storage |
Product |
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Description |
Hybrid cloud storage with seamless local integration and optimized data transfer |
Best in class performance, reliability, and pricing for all your storage needs |
|
Capacity |
100 GB |
5 GB-months of Regional Storage |
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Other |
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Provider-specific offering
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Items are listed here because:
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Amazon
| Product | Description | Details |
|---|---|---|
Managed service that provides easy encryption with administrative controls |
20k free requests per month |
|
Test your iOS, Android and FireOS apps on real devices in the AWS cloud |
Free one-time trial of 250 Device Minutes |
|
Fast, flexible, fully managed push messaging service |
|
|
Continuous delivery service for fast and reliable application updates |
1 Active Pipeline per month |
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Monitoring for AWS cloud resources and applications |
|
|
Cost-effective email service in the Cloud |
|
|
Scalable queue for storing messages as they travel between computers |
1 millions requests |
|
Task coordination and state management service for Cloud applications |
|
|
Amazon Chime is a modern unified communications service that offers frustration-free meetings with exceptional audio and video quality |
Basic subscription is free to use for as long you’d like |
|
Fully managed build service that builds and tests code in the cloud |
100 build minutes per month of build.general1.small compute type usage |
|
Coordinate components of distributed applications |
4k state transitions per month |
|
Analyze and debug your applications |
|
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Migrate databases with minimal downtime |
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| Product | Description | Details |
|---|---|---|
Scalable, high-performance virtual machines |
|
|
Platform for building scalable web applications and mobile backends |
|
|
A global service for real-time and reliable messaging and streaming data |
10 GB of messages per month |
|
One-click container orchestration via Kubernetes clusters, managed by Google |
|
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Monitoring, logging, and diagnostics for applications on Cloud Platform and AWS |
|
|
Label detection, OCR, facial detection and more |
1k units per month |
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Speech to text transcription, the same that powers Google’s own products |
60 minutes per month |
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Derive insights from unstructured text using Google machine learning |
5k units per month |
|
Manage your infrastructure and applications from the command-line in any browser |
Free access to Cloud Shell, including 5 GB of persistent disk storage |
|
Fast, consistent, reliable container builds on Google Cloud Platform |
120 build-minutes per day |
Conclusion
Free services listed above, even if limited compared to the standard version, shouldn’t be overlooked. They can be used for prototyping, having fun with a crazy idea, teaching and/or self-learning. Have fun!
To go further: