Amazon Web Services LLC (AWS) last week said it will offer developers and businesses a free instance of its Amazon EC2 cloud service for a year and grant similar access to its S3, Elastic Block Store, Elastic Loan Balancing and data transfer services.

Amazon said that the offer is intended to gain its cloud services new developer and business users, foster new applications and familiarize users with its services. The company hopes that new developers will upgrade to AWS' paid services if their applications are successful.

"Everyone from entrepreneurial college students to developers at Fortune 500 companies can now launch new applications at zero expense and with the peace of mind that they can instantly scale to accommodate growth," said Adam Selipsky, AWS vice president.

AWS' offering includes the following free for one year:

• 750 hours per month of micro Linux Amazon EC2 instance usage.

• 750 hours per month of an Amazon Elastic Load Balancer

• 10 GB per month of Amazon Elastic Block Storage

• 5 GB per month of Amazon S3 Storage

• 30 GB per month of Internet data transfer

• 25 machine hours per month of Amazon SimpleDB

• 100,000 requests per month of Amazon Simple Queue Service

• 100,000 requests per month, 100,000 notifications over HTTP per month, 1,000 notifications over email per month for Amazon Simple Notification Service