Did You Know About AWS Always-Free Services

#aws #freeservices #awscloudoperations #sre

If you're like me and frequently using AWS for personal projects, or creating proofs of concept during your free time, it's essential to manage your AWS costs effectively. Fortunately, AWS provides some fantastic free services that are always available, with certain conditions.

In this blog post, I will walk through what's always free as of September 20, 2023, and discuss how you can take advantage of these offerings.

Every new AWS customer receives some services for free during their first 12 months, which is an excellent way to start your AWS journey.

These offerings fall into a few categories:

12 Months Free: This means you can use these services for free for your first year after signing up.
Always Free: These services are perpetually free, even beyond your first year.
Free Trials: Some services offer free trials for a limited period.

Now, let's look at some of the noteworthy offers available as part of the "Always Free" category.

Compute:

1 million Lambda requests per month: A fantastic way to develop and use the service without incurring charges.

Databases:

25 GB storage for Amazon DynamoDB: This is enough to handle 200 million requests per month, which is an incredible offer.

Serverless:

25 GB offer for Amazon DynamoDB.
1 million AWS Lambda free requests per month.
1 million Amazon SNS publishes, including 1000 email deliveries.
1 million Amazon SQS requests.
4000 AWS Step Functions state transitions per month.

Security, Identity & Compliance:

50,000 Amazon Cognito Monthly Active Users (MAUs) each month.
20,000 free requests for AWS Key Management.
Unlimited 30-day trial for AWS Security Hub.
10 million AWS WAF Bot Control requests to protect your application from common web threats.
Unlimited AWS Resource Access Manager usage, allowing secure resource sharing across AWS accounts or within your organization.

Network and Content Delivery:

1 TB of Amazon CloudFront data transfer out or 10,000,000 HTTP/HTTPS requests.
1,000 IP (CIDR) blocks per month in Amazon Route 53.
Up to 50 AWS endpoints for health checks for new and existing customers within or linked to their AWS account.

Management & Governance:

10 custom metrics and alarms for Amazon CloudWatch, including 1,000,000 API requests and 3 dashboards with up to 50 metrics each per month.
Unlimited AWS License Manager usage.
Unlimited AWS Well-Architected Tool.
1,000 API calls per month for AWS Service Catalog.
A trial that delivers a single copy of management events in each region for free via AWS CloudTrail.
12 AWS Systems Manager features.
1,000 handler operations per month per account for AWS CloudFormation.
Always Free - AWS Control Tower.
Unlimited AWS Organizations.
Always Free - AWS re:Post, a community-driven Q&A service to help solve AWS-related technical problems.
40 million metric samples ingested for Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus.