Ask HN: What are some great “Free” services provided by IBM, Amazon, etc.?

There is the AWS free tier[0]. which means you can get free ec2 instances:

> 750 hours per month of Linux, RHEL, or SLES t2.micro instance usage.

(along with S3 and some other services) I think it's only free for a year though.

Other than that, they have lumberyard[1] which is a game engine, but I think there are some weird terms like you need to use AWS if you use a server[2][3].

[0] https://aws.amazon.com/free/

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/lumberyard/

[2] https://aws.amazon.com/service-terms/#57._Amazon_Lumberyard_...

[3] > 57.4 Operating Restrictions. Without our prior written consent, (a) the Lumberyard Materials (including any permitted modifications and derivatives) may only be run on computer equipment owned and operated by you or your End Users, or on AWS Services, and may not be run on any Alternate Web Service and (b) your Lumberyard Project may not read data from or write data to any Alternate Web Service. “Alternate Web Service” means any non-AWS web service that is similar to or can act as a replacement for the services listed at docs.aws.amazon.com/console/lumberyard/userguide/alternate-web-services .

IBM Bluemix[0] has some good trial offerings, you can always contact them and say you're a hobbyist and they may be able to give you a longer trial. Their IoT platform is pretty cool and you have access to Watson.

There is also a surprising amount of open source projects they put out[1][2].

Disclosure: I work at IBM in the Cloud Division.

[0] https://console.ng.bluemix.net/

[1] https://github.com/ibm

[2] https://github.com/strongloop

If you have a MSDN subscription, perhaps from your employer, you get a free $50/mo -> $150/mo Azure credit.

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/member-offers/msdn...

Google offers $300 in credit that you can use on anything you like for one year as soon as you sign up right off the bat, and AWS has offered the Free Tier almost since inception.

For startups, Google[1], Amazon[2], Microsoft BizSpark[3], OVH Digital Launch Pad[4], Digital Ocean[5], have startup programs that you can apply to with varying amounts of service credit (usually expiring afer one year). (Don't write off OVH: theirs seems to be the smallest, but their stuff is by far the highest value.. 2GB instances for $3.49/month and great DDoS protection; however, their cloud dashboard takes a little time to get used to, but seems pretty powerful once into it.)

1. $20k to $100k in service credits @ Google: https://cloud.google.com/developers/startups/

2. $5k at Amazon, $15k in accelerators: https://aws.amazon.com/activate/

3. Up to $120k at Microsoft: https://bizspark.microsoft.com/

4. $500 to $100k at OVH: https://www.ovh.com/us/dlp/

5. up to $100k at Digital Ocean (not sure if this is actually launched yet -- we applied for https://userify.com but never heard back): https://www.digitalocean.com/hatch/

I think DynamoDB is waning in it's already limlited popularity. It has some clever ideas, but is really hard to implement. The main selling point is price, but you kinda get what you pay for.