AWS Free Tier
💡 Definition
The AWS Free Tier enables you to gain free, hands-on experience with the AWS platform, products, and services. It includes offers that are always free, free for 12 months, and short-term free trials.
🔑 Key Concepts
- Three Types of Offers:
- Always Free: These offers do not expire and are available to all AWS customers. Examples include 1 million Lambda requests per month and 10 GB of Glacier retrievals per month.
- 12 Months Free: These offers are available for 12 months following your initial AWS account creation date. Examples include 750 hours of
t2.microort3.microEC2 instance usage per month, and 5 GB of S3 Standard storage. - Trials: Short-term free trials starting from the date you activate a particular service. Examples include a free trial for Amazon SageMaker or Redshift.
- Account-Specific: The Free Tier is tied to your AWS account.
- Usage-Based: The free tier provides a specific amount of usage per month. If you exceed the free tier limits, you are billed at standard rates.
⚙️ How it Works
The free tier is automatically applied to your account's usage each month. You can track your free tier usage in the AWS Billing and Cost Management console to see how much you have used and what is remaining.
🎯 Use Cases
- Learning and Experimentation: Exploring AWS services without incurring costs.
- Prototyping: Building and testing a small-scale application before scaling up.
- Running Small Applications: Hosting a low-traffic personal website or blog for free.
💰 Pricing Model
- The Free Tier itself is not a pricing model, but a set of offers that waive the standard pricing for a limited amount of usage.
📝 Exam Tips (CLF-C02)
- Understand the difference between the three types of free tier offers (Always Free, 12 Months, Trials).
- Be aware of key services included in the 12-month free tier, such as 750 hours of a small EC2 instance and 5GB of S3 storage.
- Remember that exceeding the free tier limits results in standard charges.
See Also: * Billing Dashboard * AWS Budgets