We are very happy to announce that Amazon Web Services has signed up as a sponsor to BetaFoundry and is providing $500 in credit for use on their cloud computing services. Amazon is a pioneer in the cloud computing industry and the variety of offerings and scale offered by AWS is unrivaled by any competitor.

Amazon Web Services has revolutionized the acquisition of computing components by allowing you to hire them on demand, 24/7, and for any period of time with billing based on hourly prices.  In addition, AWS provides many other valuable services such as: S3, which takes the hassle out of storing large quantities of files reliably and securely; Cloudfront, which allows you to deliver content (including media streaming) fast and cope with any amount of user demand; SimpleDB & RDS which offer a scalable and rapid database solution; Elastic MapReduce which takes the hassle and scaling issues out of processing massive amounts of raw data.

As a guide, the $500 credit from Amazon translates to any of the following:

- 5,882 hours of computing on EC2,

- More than 33 TB of data served by Cloudfront

- 5million emails delivered by Simple Email Service

- 3.5TB of secure data storage for one month on S3

We are very happy to welcome them onboard!