Amazon gave me the equivalent of 10,000 free hours on a small EC2 instance when I was working on my last book. I used a few hours of this to prepare a custom AMI with all of the examples in my book set up with Ubuntu and all required infrastructure. I'll be able to keep updated book example AMIs in S3 forever now without it costing me any money out of pocket.

I also used some of this free time to do a 4 day machine learning run on all current English Wikipedia articles.

I will always create an AMI for all of my future books - awesome for readers to be able to have everything all set up. Also, they can clone my AMI, and have a fast start to deploying anything in my book that they want to use for their own projects.

For Amazon, this seems like viral marketing at its best :-)

I think that it was very savvy of Amazon to do this because I ended up writing a lot of material in the book on using Amazon AWS (Elastic MapReduce, S3, etc.). I now spend lots of time experimenting and blogging about AWS, and I ask my customers to host on AWS because I am now so used to using it.

I used to host customer work on VPSs or cheap dedicated servers, but now Amazon is definitely my deployment platform first choice and recommendation. (BTW, I host some of my own stuff on AppEngine because it is even cheaper, but the extra effort of dealing with AppEngine makes it not as attractive for customer projects.)