Hey there! With the tremendous growth in cloud adoption over the past decade, all major cloud providers now offer generous free tiers allowing users to test drive their cutting edge platforms.
In this comprehensive guide, we‘ll equip you with full information covering the most popular cloud platforms that provide free tiers including:
- Details of credits, services and duration of their free offers
- Real world examples built on these free tiers
- Capabilities compared across providers
- Limitations to watch out for
By the end, you‘ll have the hands-on experiences of fellow developers to guide your own trial runs and discover the best platform matching your needs…at zero cost!
Why Cloud Platform Free Tiers Matter
Before diving into the offerings, let‘s briefly understand why cloud providers invest in providing such expansive free tiers.
Key business motivations include:
-
Generating trials – Free tiers allow potential customers to evaluate products before committing long term.
-
Spurring adoption – Hands-on exposure can lead teams to onboard fully to paid versions over time.
-
Seed open source ecosystems – Freemium models enable developers to create tools and grow communities around platforms.
-
Lock-in customers – Teams investing heavily in new architectures tend to stick with the underlying platform long term.
In essence, cloud vendor‘s sacrifice short term revenue for the payback of higher lifetime value over time per customer.
Now let‘s examine the free tier offers across leading platforms in 2023.
1. Amazon Web Services (AWS)
As the #1 public cloud provider today, AWS needs no introduction. It offers one of the most flexible and extensive free tiers spanning it‘s over 200 cloud services.
The key elements of AWS free tier include:
- 750 hours per month of t2.micro EC2 instances for 12 months
- 5 GB S3 cloud storage for a whole year
- Multiple full featured services free for 30 days like Redshift, EMR and more
To put AWS market dominance in context, AWS cloud infrastructure accounted for 33% public cloud spend in Q3 2022 valued at $21 billion!
This global infrastructure coupled with the ability to test highly adopted services like EC2 and S3 for free makes AWS free tier hugely useful.
Real World Use Cases
Here are some examples of what developers have built using AWS free tier:
- Data pipelines moving S3 data to Redshift for analysis
- Containerized microservices running on ECS Fargate
- Serverless ETL using Lambda, S3 and Glue
- Cloud native apps deployed on EC2, ALB and RDS
Be warned that the ease of use can also lead to surprise bills if not monitored diligently though!
2. Google Cloud Platform
While AWS leads in market share, Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is its closest competitor leveraging Google‘s engineering expertise.
GCP offers a $300 free trial along with a selection of services under always free tier.
Key elements of Google Cloud‘s offering include:
- $300 in free credits for 90 days
- Compute Engine for VMs, App Engine and Cloud functions free forever
- Free tier on popular services like BigQuery, Pub/Sub and more
Google Cloud accounted for 10% of the $88 billion global public cloud spend in 2021 per Gartner, so significant adoption and growth.
Real World Use Cases
GCP services like BigQuery, Dataflow and Pub/Sub play a big role in:
- Streaming data pipelines for ingestion into BigQuery
- Big data workflows leveraging Dataproc and Dataflow
- AI/ML experiments taking advantage of Vertex AI, AutoML and TPUs
The free tier allows you to test innovations in data and ML without significant upfront investment.
3. Microsoft Azure
With Microsoft‘s enterprise reach, Azure adoption has skyrocketed in recent years making it a close #2 behind AWS.
Microsoft provides a $200 free credit along with dozens of always free services.
Key aspects of Azure‘s offering include
- $200 in free credits for 30 days
- Over 25 products across categories free for 12 months
- Free access to Azure Devops, Functions, VMs and more
Azure crossed $90 billion in revenue over the last year showing the acceleration in adoption among enterprises.
Real World Use Cases
Developers take advantage of Azure credits and platform to quickly build and deploy:
- Websites and mobile backends with App Service and Functions
- Business applications with Azure Logic Apps and data services
- Containerized workloads leveraging AKS
- Machine learning models with Azure ML studio
The ability to use enterprise-grade services for prototypes is a key attraction.
4. Oracle Cloud Free Tier
While not at scale of the Big 3 yet, Oracle cloud offers compelling capabilities around Oracle‘s industry leading database technologies.
The 30 day $300 free trial provides full access including:
- 2 AMD or 1 OCPU VM instance
- 2 Autonomous Database instances
- Load balancer, block volumes, object storage
Key highlights include:
- Managed Exadata infrastructure
- Automated database tuning and scaling
- Isolation and security controls
For use cases involving relational datasets and workloads, the ability to evaluate Oracle‘s cloud using the Always Free resources and credits can prove very helpful.
5. IBM Cloud
IBM Cloud is tailored toward enterprise scale and regulates system resources to provide consistent high performance.
The free tier grants access to:
- $200 credits for 30 days
- Cloudant DBaaS with 1GB storage
- Virtual servers and containers
- Services like Watson Assistant, AppID
To get started, the first step is setting up an account using IBMid or creating an IBM Cloud account email.
IBM Cloud‘s platform crossed $22 billion in revenue over 2022 powering large enterprises worldwide with its highly reliable infrastructure.
Real World Use Cases
- Digital transformation apps with access to Watson AI services
- Regulated workloads leveraging IBM‘s security focus
- Data analytics through interfaces to Cloudant JSON store
- Hybrid and multi-cloud deployments with keep your own key (KYOK) approach
IBM cloud‘s sales team offers extended trials for more thorough testing as well.
6. Alibaba Cloud
While not as well known in US markets, Alibaba Cloud is the leading infrastructure provider in China. It offers a range of services with free tier eligibility.
Key aspects of the Alibaba Cloud free tier cover:
- 12 months free on certain always free products
- $300-$3000 in credits depending on bundle
- Short term trials on Elastic Compute Cloud (ECS) and more
Businesses wanting to reach Asian markets can trial infrastructure deployments in Alibaba Cloud‘s data centers across the region using these credits and discounted offers.
The platform generated over $9 billion in revenue in the last fiscal year cementing its leadership in China.
7. OVH Cloud
While lagging giants like AWS and Azure, OVH Cloud sets itself apart with high performance computing capabilities.
It grants $100 in credits along with access to servers suitable for spiking CPU and GPU based workloads.
Specifically you gain access to:
- $100 in credit for 60 days
- GPU and CPU optimized instance types
- Both private and public cloud options
- Global deployment across 30+ data centers
The ability to instantly provision high compute servers delivered OVH year on year revenue growth of 16%.
8. Digital Ocean
Catering specifically to developers and SMBs, Digital Ocean stands out for its simplicity and ease of use.
It provides a transparent $100 in platform credit usable across a number of infrastructure services and managed databases.
Covering:
- $100 in credit over 60 days
- Fast SSD backed droplet servers
- Managed databases, load balancing and more
Digital Ocean continues strong growth with revenue crossing $552 million in 2022, validating developer love for their platform.
The generous trial duration and managed services make it trivial to deploy apps on Digital Ocean.
9. Linode
Linode offers a specialist cloud tailored to developers wanting more transparency and performance.
It grants $100 in infrastructure credit for 2 whole months spanning:
- High memory Nanode Linux instances
- Managed Kubernetes clusters and block storage
- Cloud firewalls with ACL rules
Developers have gravitated to Linode‘s tuned platform and transparency growing yearly revenue to $325 million in 2021.
The lengthy 60 day trial can help effectively evaluate if Linode matches your infrastructure needs.
10. Tencent Cloud
Tencent Cloud is the second biggest IaaS provider in China powering many consumer internet companies across Asia.
It takes a unique approach by providing targeted free trials:
Two distinct options exist:
– Individual Free Trial: $50 credit for 60 days
– Business Free Trial: $300 credit over 12 months
Additionally, always free services around basic storage, CDN and monitoring continue unhindered.
Tencent Cloud crossed $4.7 billion revenue in their last fiscal year signaling the maturation of Chinese cloud players on the global stage.
Comparing Cloud Platform Capabilities
While the free tiers allow hands-on evaluation, understanding the technical capabilities can help determine long term fit.
Some key considerations around cloud platform capabilities include:
| Category | Considerations |
|---|---|
| Compute | Instance types for different workloads, autoscaling options |
| Storage | Object vs block vs archived options, replication and data services |
| Networking | Globally distributed infrastructure, hybrid and multi-cloud networking, CDN integration |
| Databases | Managed SQL, NoSQL, in-memory, graph, time-series database services |
| Analytics | Support for big data and real time analytics, data warehouses |
| Security | Isolation controls, DDoS protection, data encryption standards |
The major platforms have significant breadth and depth across these areas that trials help assess firsthand.
Limitations of Free Tiers to Keep In Mind
While extremely useful, some intrinsic limitations exist in relying solely on cloud platform free tiers:
- Scale restrictions on instance types, storage and more
- Loss of critical data unless backed up without credits
- Surprise billing without usage alerts and limits
- Migration costs to shift real production workloads
Mitigation tactics:
- Align testing workloads carefully to free tier limits
- Actively track usage to avoid unwanted charges
- Scale down services aggressively if nearing quotas
- Have bail out plans before trial periods end
Understanding these caveats helps cushion against painful gotchas down the line!
Wrapping Up
We just unpacked everything you need to know about the popular cloud platforms providing free tiers today spanning credits, scope and limitations.
More importantly, we covered real world examples of what teams have already been built leveraging these trials to spark creativity without fear of failure!
I hope you found this guide helpful for your own exploration. As you conduct your trials, share what worked and any lessons so we can all learn collectively!
So which free tier will you be testing out next?
