Bangalore: Amazon Web services has made a smart move and given the Cloud computing users a reason to smile, the company has announced to offer free cloud services for Windows server applications for a year provided the usage doesn’t exceed 750 hours a month.  

This seems like to be the right time for those who want to try their hand on cloud computing and also an opportunity for enterprises to experiment on cloud without much risk or expense. The Amazon Web Service (AWS) provides free usage of cloud for Windows Server 2008 R2 and Linux, besides Simple DB Elastic Block storage, S3 and Elastic Load Balancer apps are also offered free of cost to its users.

Some of the Industry experts hinted that this move by Amazon seems like a strategy to seek attention of those customers who were planning to shift to Azure platform owned by Microsoft which also offers cloud services.

Amazon was in favor of Linux by making it a part of its ‘Free Usage Tier’ providing free access to Linux servers since 2010 and now Windows has also made its way to be a part of this plan.

"Our customers want the flexibility to choose how they build their applications without being locked into a particular programming model, language, or operating system. We continue to focus on increasing that flexibility," said Peter De Santis, general manager of Amazon EC2.

Meanwhile other key players like Red Hat, IBM and Rackspace are gearing up to compete each other by promising to provide more efficient services than Amazon does and trying to make themselves more open. But Amazon stays calm as it is aware that the competitors will have to face the challenge ahead to beat their free of cost offer.