Take a Free Spin with SUSE on Amazon EC2

I like free things.  No.  That’s not right.

I like free things… a lot.  If I walk through a mall’s food court, and someone offers me a small sample of orange chicken on a toothpick, I am going to eat it.  It doesn’t matter if I am even hungry or not.  I am going to devour that free orange chicken.

My love of free things is not limited to food – though I could easily talk about free food for quite some time because, hey, free food – I’m also quite the fan of free tech stuff too.

Case in point: Amazon Web Services (AWS) free usage tier offers up SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, running in Amazon EC2, for free.  Like the orange chicken, it’s not unlimited – but they give us quite a bit more than a little taste.  750 hours.  Per month.  For a year.  For free. (Could you imagine getting 750 free bites of orange chicken for free every month?  That’s a lot of orange chicken.)

So, the question is, what can you do with those 750 free hours of SUSE Linux Enterprise in AWS?  The answer is “a boat-load”.

Hypothetical situation that I know a bunch of you have thought about: Let’s say you’ve setup a server for your company, running a content management system.  Something that you’ve built using, let’s say, Drupal and Postgres.  But that server it is running on is getting a little long in the tooth.  You’d love to migrate it to “the cloud”, but you’d like to take a cloud service for a test run before making a big investment.  Boom.  Start up a SUSE Linux Enterprise free tier instance on Amazon EC2, Zypper up your database server (and any other packages you need), and voila.  You are in business.

Of course, you could also do some development or simple integration testing.  Or you could just experiment with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and Amazon EC2 to test out and see how they work and what is new.  And then there is always that Minecraft server that you need to get going (which, now that I think about it, is a great idea).

The hours on AWS, with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, are yours.  Use them in whatever way makes your heart sing.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go get some orange chicken.