Your work can't give you a few VMs in a lab somewhere that you can get free rein to prototype on? That is usually not too hard to get..
it seems the idea of the Amazon free tier is to give people a taste of AWS so they can decide to go in more or not. It's not really designed to be a free prototype for existing large customers product. Like the other poster said, you can host a tiny VM for $6 or so a month, not a big expense.
If you are asking for $4000 a month production cluster, yes that is harder to just get..
it seems the idea of the Amazon free tier is to give people a taste of AWS so they can decide to go in more or not. It's not really designed to be a free prototype for existing large customers product. Like the other poster said, you can host a tiny VM for $6 or so a month, not a big expense.
If you are asking for $4000 a month production cluster, yes that is harder to just get..