There is quite a big offer available to charities at the moment from Amazon Web Services (AWS), the cloud based IT services arm of the retail giant through the software ‘donation’ site Tech Trust or tt-exchange.

In fact you could build your organisation a cloud based IT infrastructure with remote desktop server, webserver, database engines and cloud storage and still have free credit left over.

For £142 plus VAT, eligible charities get $2000 credit with AWS to use on their storage, computing and database products and it is renewable each year. Now my own experience with a charity client that successfully moved their remote desktop server onto AWS a year ago and also uses their cloud storage – their bills will be completely covered by this offer. Needless to say, they’ve applied.

But it’s also the way that this resource can be quickly used to create a trial application or to work out some new infrastructure without having to buy lots of kit where AWS excels even before this offer. You pay for what you use.

We all know that Amazon have a way of avoiding paying tax to the countries where they operate and AWS is part of that. So this is them giving to charity. If you can stomach that… dig in.

(By the way, from what I’ve found out so far, this offer doesn’t extend to other businesses selling value added products for AWS through the AWS marketplace – but I think all pure AWS products are included)