AWS has always aimed to help make technology that was historically cost-prohibitive and difficult for many organizations to adopt much more accessible to a broader audience. This applies to open source technologies as well. We help customers to run a wide variety of open source operating systems on EC2. We offer managed services for open source databases such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Redis. Or you can use Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) to run your Docker containers using Kubernetes. We do the undifferentiated heavy lifting so that customers don’t have to download, install, manage, patch, and scale these open source packages. This allows you to focus on building your applications so you can innovate faster. We also continue to widen our open source collaboration by sponsoring foundations and events, increasing code contributions, open sourcing our own technology, and helping communities to sustain the overall health of open source.

Today, we are excited to further extend our support by offering AWS promotional credits to open source projects. Typically, these credits are used to perform upstream and performance testing, CI/CD, or storage of artifacts on AWS. We hope this program will free up resources for open source projects to further expand and innovate in their communities, as several projects are already doing.

The Rust language has seen lots of growth in AWS, with services such as Lambda, EC2, and S3 all choosing to use Rust in performance-sensitive components. We open-sourced Firecracker, which is also written using Rust. And it’s the most-loved language in the latest Stack Overflow survey. Alex Crichton, Rust Core Team Member says: “We’re thrilled that AWS, which the Rust project has used for years, is helping to sponsor Rust’s infrastructure. This sponsorship enables Rust to sustainably host infrastructure on AWS to ship compiler artifacts, provide crates.io crate downloads, and house automation required to glue all our processes together. These services span a myriad of AWS offerings from CloudFront to EC2 to S3. Diversifying the sponsorship of the Rust project is also critical to its long-term success, and we’re excited that AWS is directly aiding this goal.”

AdoptOpenJDK is the community-led effort to produce pre-built binaries from OpenJDK. Martijn Verburg, Director of AdoptOpenJDK, says: “The London Java Community is incredibly pleased to have Amazon Web Services sponsor AdoptOpenJDK. AWS is one of the leading cloud providers for Java workloads and its broad IaaS offering allows us to maintain a scalable and robust build farm for years to come. We thank AWS for being a great supporter of AdoptOpenJDK and the Java developer community.“

The Central Repository, more popularly known as Maven Central, is a critical piece of infrastructure for Java application development. “Sonatype has been leveraging the scalability of AWS services to provide key infrastructure to deliver The Central Repository (Maven Central), the world’s largest repository of open source Java components to the community. The AWS promotional credits will enable a combined higher level of investment in this critical community resource.” — Brian Fox, Co-founder & CTO, Sonatype.

Kubernetes, Prometheus, and Envoy are some of the projects in the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. “We’re very appreciative of AWS making this substantial contribution of cloud promotional credits to CNCF-hosted projects.” said Dan Kohn, executive director of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). “CNCF projects rely on cloud promotional credits for their continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD), which is essential for maintaining their high development velocity.“

Julia is a programming language designed for high performance computing. It is used for data visualization, data science, machine learning, and scientific computing. Viral B. Shah, co-creator of the Julia language said: “The Julia project is thankful to AWS. A lot of the Julia community infrastructure runs on AWS, and the savings from receiving AWS Promotional Credits will allow us to spend money on other community activities, such as the Julia Season of Contributions (JSOC), improving diversity in the Julia community, and funding travel scholarships to JuliaCon.“

How do I apply?

To be eligible, you will need an active AWS Account, including a valid payment method on file, and no outstanding invoices (note that promotional credits cannot be applied retroactively). If you already have an account, you can find your account ID here. Your software project must also be licensed under an OSI-approved license, but please still apply if the commonly-used licenses in your project’s space (e.g., open data) are not OSI-approved!

Use the AWS credits for open source projects application form to provide complete details including your account number, the amount of credits being requested, and a brief description of how the credits will be used. The credits will expire after one year. Applications will be reviewed within 10-15 business days. Assuming that they meet the basic eligibility requirements above, we will be examining applications on the basis of their relevance to AWS and its customers. The Amazon Leadership Principles will be used as the guiding light to select the projects. We’ll also generally favor projects with maintainers from multiple entities or that are owned by foundations or non-profits. You will be notified via email if your application is approved, and then you will receive a welcome email once the promotional credit has been applied to your account.

Learn more about how AWS is investing in communities, contributing code, and hiring developers to work in open source at opensource.amazon.com.