Amazon Web Services is allowing customers use of a free database service along with its other free cloud features by adding its Relational Database Service (RDS) to its AWS Free Usage Tier, the company announced in a blog.

Amazon said the service allows customers use of MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server or the Oracle database for a year for free.

The service can be used as a Micro DB Instance for up to 750 hours per month, with 20 GB of database capacity, 10 million I/Os and 20 GB of backup storage.

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Biswaroop Palit, senior product manager for Amazon's RDS, said in a video on the Amazon blog that the service is designed for websites that handle low traffic and testing.

Amazon's Free Usage Tier is intended to help new AWS customers by allowing them to test applications as they ramp up cloud operations.

The tier also offers a free Amazon EC2 Micro Instance and free use of Amazon S3, Amazon Elastic Block Store, Amazon Elastic Load Balancing and AWS data transfer.

"AWS’s free usage tier can be used for anything you want to run in the cloud: launch new applications, test existing applications in the cloud, or simply gain hands-on experience with AWS," Amazon said on its Free Usage Tier page.

PUBLISHED OCT. 5, 2012