Last few days i have been investigating a lot on AWS and I guess it was time for me to have my own account. Since, i wanted to just evaluate I did not want to spend much on this investigation, unless I see some sponsors :)
So, it was obvious that I signed up for the Free Tier account. Even the Free Tier requires you to provide Credit Card details which is a marketing strategy and will get activated for pay as you go once the trial period of 12 months is complete. What I liked the most was the Free Tier can run the entire year without costing you anything as long as you stay with one micro instance EC2.
Some of the features are hard to understand and you may very well over look at the usage.. Ex: 5 units of write capacity, and 10 units of read capacity for Amazon DynamoDB means that you cannot be doing more than 5 writes per second. So ensure to have appropriate delays so that you are not overstepping the usage limits and get charged.
You may want to activate some Alerts (CloudWatch) to get notifications when you cross your $0.00 limit, so that you can turn off the over-utilizing features.
The first impression on the overall feature set offered by AWS was spectacular. It is just a matter of a few minutes I was able to provision my developer box (EC2), MySQL DB (RDS).
Now that my developer environment is setup, I want to go ahead and tryout some programming.. Stay tuned to know what i have learnt..
